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You can make LLMs say almost anything. A news organization reporting "what grok said" is engaging in journalistic malpractice. It doesn't know. It just creates plausible sounding words in response to a prompt.

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the other point is that everyone else is always the "beta tester" with Musk, like his "full self driving" has killed or injured hundreds of people while he just goes "oops we should fix that" and deletes the expensive lidar sensors to increase profits so it literally jumps across the road at shadows

I really liked the description in this post b/c “aesthetic of knowledge w/o any actual tendency toward truth.” It h just kind of nails it. LLMs provide Aesthetics, but NOT actual substance by parroting specialized terms w/no contextual knowledge = dangerously unreliable, sometimes lethally so.

KetAnthropic JoshAI@ketanjoshi.co

just so it's clear: this is the exact core function of genAI Fascist government and climate deniers love it because it can produce the aesthetics of knowledge without any actual tendency towards truth. It is automated denialism. Shame on every climate scientist promoting its use (there are lots)

Worth noting that AI image moderation is an effectively solved problem. Any of the frontier models can detect NSFW images and refuse to return them to the user. Grok is clearly not doing this

They often err on the side of caution sometimes blocking non-NSFW images

And? We're not talking about offline apps like ComfyUI, etc. We're talking about a chat bot that's accessible to literally anyone on Twitter that has zero safety rails

This. It's just a program. The 'write an apology expressing regret for creating CASM content' prompt, and whomever created it, is the news story, not its response. Dril's follow up "now show no remorse" prompt illustrated that perfectly.

Which is why “artificial intelligence” is a total misnomer. An LLM holds no beliefs and makes no judgments. It knows nothing and decides nothing. It has no mind at all, in any meaningful sense. So there is really no reason to use the term “intelligence” in describing what it does.

I'd argue though that since this was posted without prompting by the journalists, it can be reported on as could any company statement. "xAI, using the conceit that Grok was saying this, issued this statement on the matter: ...."

Do you know of other outlets that have gotten this correct for this or past issues like this? Feels like it’s worth mentioning to readers that do not understand this stuff that any ‘replies’ making the rounds are not official explicitly, at minimum?

Yeah, I was half joking. It appears necessary we develop defences against LLM generated content - if we wish to keep any sense of shared reality with *some kind of ethical basis*. I wonder if any of the large antivirus/security companies are actively developing such systems. Any insight?

It's fine to report on the failings of the guardrails. It is journalistic malpractice to say that Grok "said" anything about it. Since you can manipulate Grok to say whatever you want.

Do you think the responses it gives to specific queries and Grok's posts to X should be treated the same or different? Am I wrong to think there's a bit more selectivity in what is posted to X? That's my operating assumption and may be wrong.

Yes, you are wrong to think that. You can tag @ grok in a Twitter thread and it will reply to your post, which is what happened here. Those posts aren't any more of an official statement from grok than its replies anywhere else.