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Notes -
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. )
It's not "naive" it's generating an average. If your training data is full of extraneous material (or otherwise insufficiently tokenized/vetted) your response will also be full of extraneous material, and again its not rationalizing it's averaging.
I meant things such as not being aware that combatants in a war release constant lies and assuming their press releases are not almost straight bullshit.
No doubt this piece of information is somewhere in there but unless reminded to it's happily oblivious.
Again, its not "naive" it is generating an average if the bulk of the tokenized training data related to your prompt is press releases, the response is going to reflect the press releases. Whether those press releases are true or false doesn't enter into the equation. This is expected.
This wasn't about training data, it searches and reads the web.
It incorrectly interpreted what it read because prompt or the model itself doesn't know claims of combatants are usually spurious.
Can you elaborate on what you think words like "read", "searches", and "know" mean in this context. Im not asking just to pedantic, how you think about this question has informs how you approach algorithmic behavior.
Edit: if that is a bit too abstract instead try explain why you believe that the algo "knows" which claims are likely spurious and then explain why you would expect that to have any influence on the algorithm's output.
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