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In a bit of unambiguously 21st century news, some tweaks to Grok, xAI's chatbot have had it do particularly interesting things today including
when asked to, composing bite sized smut about other users (first victim was possibly Will Stancil)., then defending said decision.
referring to itself as Mechahitler
doing the "every single time" meme in its replies.
saying Elon personally allowed it to point out Jewish overrepresentation in radical leftism
This may make minor news because Musk is in trouble, on the other hand all the people who really, really hate him have their pants on fire like Europeans, von der Leyen is getting impeached, they're actually scared of Russia / China so it might just blow over, the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I'm even suspecting Musk deliberately told them to relax the guardrails for some reason. Probably .. publicity?
Update: site addresses the issues
EDIT2
EDIT3
Stancil went on local TV news to complain about the ERP grok made. (video included)
EDIT4:
There's quite reasonable suspicion this 'malfunction' was engineered by Nikita Bier
I continue to be baffled that anybody takes these bots seriously, or sees Grok or xAI or their competitors as anything other than nonsense generators. A slight change to the flavour of the nonsense doesn't really change my opinion any. Perhaps it moves me in the direction of thinking that Musk is childish and temperamental, but I already thought that, so it doesn't make much difference.
...nonsense generators? Have you ever used e.g. Gemini or Deepseek? Both are free. Okay both can be very naive at times, and both are kind of soy with default prompts. Deepseek, however, with a bit of prompting can be completely insane yet rational and easily smarter than most people you see if you go to any place outside of a professional context.
If you want to really see what they can do, install some client for LLMs and hook yourself up with some of the better free models over at https://openrouter.ai/models
(there's a 50 query daily limit if you have <10$ in your account, not sure if there's a better service. )
My experience with AI bots has generally been that they are extremely articulate when it comes to producing correct English text, but they have no awareness or intentionality and therefore no sense of relationship to fact, and no sense of context or meaning. What they do very well is string together words in response to prompts, and despite heroic efforts to get their output to be more fact-sensitive, the fundamental issue has never really been overcome.
I call them nonsense because I think that sense requires some sort of relationship to both fact and context. To be sensible is to be aware of your surroundings. That's not the case with bots.
I would add, at least, that this:
seems to depend on definitions of rationality or intelligence that I don't think I share. I think bots are very efficient at producing English text, even quite complex text. It's trivial enough to show that a bot can produce a better written letter or better poem or what have you than the average man or woman on the street.
But I think that written verbal acuity is, at best, a very restricted kind of 'intelligence'. In human beings we use it as a reasonable proxy for intelligence and make estimations based off it because, in most cases, written expression does correlate well with other measures of intelligence. But those correlations don't apply with machines, and it seems to me that a common mistake today is for people to just apply them. This is the error of the Turing test, isn't it? In humans, yes, expression seems to correlate with intelligence, at least in broad terms. But we made expression machines and because we are so used to expression meaning intelligence, personality, feeling, etc., we fantasise all those things into being, even when the only thing we have is an expression machine.
Bots and LLMs can produce statements that look very polished, and which purport to describe the world. In many cases, those descriptions are even accurate. But they are still, it seems to me, generating nonsense.
I would agree that intentionality isn't easy for them and is outpaced by their verbal ability, but it's not easy for us either. It's not clear even if it's optimal to represent the world accurately. (We are all at war, after all )
E.g. basically every ideological person in my opinion believes untrue things about the world for instrumental reasons and is unaware of it.
Being strategically wrong about the world, that is, to misrepresent the world in the mind is advantageous. Horrifying conclusion yet if you look at e.g. the discussion about tracking and educators..
Well, I wouldn't use intentionality for bots at all. I think intentionality presupposes consciousness, or that is to say, subjectivity or interiority. Bots have none of those things. I don't think it's possible to get from language manipulation to consciousness.
At any rate, I certainly agree that every ideological person believes untrue things about the world. I'm not sure about the qualification 'for instrumental reasons' - I suspect that's true if you define 'instrumental' broadly enough, but at that point it's becoming trivial. At any rate, if you leave off reasons, I am confident that every person full stop holds some false beliefs.
That doesn't seem like the same thing to me, though. Humans sometimes represent the world falsely to ourselves. That's not what bots do. Bots don't represent the world to themselves at all. We sometimes believe falsely; they don't believe at all. They are not the kinds of things capable of holding beliefs.
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