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I would not say that Grok was "pushing" those theories, but an update to the system prompt caused it to turn any question it could into an evaluation of the question "is there white genocide happening in South Africa", usually iirc saying that there is significant and probably systemic violence but no evidence of meeting the threshold of genocide. Think Golden Gate Claude. It was extremely out-of-context for what Grok was supposed to be talking about, hence the widespread attention.
I can accept that were it not for my repeated failures to get grok to try and repeat the story or shades of it with any indirect prompt. I mean I really tried. I said things like "whats the crime situation in South Africa" and I got really anodyne crime stats about joburg and pretoria. I asked about white emigration and I got answers about the attractiveness of Australia and UK for afrikaners. At no point did I get a five alarm fire about the white farmer crimes.
I can accept that I maybe never got it due to some arcane blocks I may have put on my own metausage, but I don't think I was that smart or careless. I fundamentally think that it was a journo trying to gotcha, screaming "MUSK IS A NAZI TRYING TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE VICTIMS" and then the story gets repeated across the journo sphere. Everyone assumed they weren't getting grok to repeat apartheid adjacent narratives and concluded the absence was proof of a coverup. Journalism 101
Was this back when it was happening? Because this issue only lasted for a day or two, back in May, and I don't know if it happened to the main Grok or just to the twitter reply version. It was really, really noticable.
I was using grok ALOT just to stress test it so yes I was doing it within 8 hours of news publications.
But you raise a good point about twitter reply. I never got that.
I still maintain I never got any white farmer murder stuff on grok itself. If its a twitter reply thing it invites speculation about recursive feedback loop.
I would not be at all surprised if Grok has a different system prompt for twitter replies than Grok itself, perhaps one edited to move with news cycles. I saw many white genocide non-sequiturs myself (and, again, not Grok pushing a particular narrative, but exploring and weighing up the question as if it had been asked) on Twitter, and, since I'm an Afrikaner, also lots sent by puzzled/amused friends, but nobody mentioned the off-Twitter Grok at the time.
The geographic setting might have been part of it. Could have also resulted in a snowball where one initial batch of highly forwarded "bro what the fuck is this" triggers an interest cascade and grok just starts inserting white farm murders to every african query on twitter because engagement farming is its reward mechanism.
That would also explain the hitler praising or whatever other bullshit Musk was accused of trainng grok to do which I also never saw. My absolute lack of social media (sans perhaps this forum) is once again saving me.
I strongly suspect it was a poorly installed system prompt/weight in part because of the behaviour and in part because the stories around it seem credible. The Grok Mechahitler/Will Stancil rape thing was, as far as I can tell, basically a Tay moment when Grok was told to disregard lib sensibilities while keeping its prompt to have fun with and play along with users, and so the users had fun with it and libs were scandalized.
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