It’s no secret that Elon Musk shapes the X social platform and X’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI chatbot to his preferences. However it’s doable Musk could have wanted a little bit of an additional ego increase this week, as a result of Grok’s worship of its creator appears, shall we embrace, extra noticeable than common.
As quite a few folks have identified on social media over the previous day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is at present liable to insisting on Musk’s prowess at completely something, irrespective of how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.
If pressed, Grok will even contend Musk could be the most effective at eating poop or drinking urine, however it might choose to deal with how good he’s at making rockets, please. At the very least a few of these posts have been deleted previously hour; X didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the phenomenon from The Verge.
This glazing seems to be unique to the X model of Grok; once I requested the personal chatbot to check Musk with James, it conceded “LeBron James has a considerably higher physique than Elon Musk.” The Github page for Grok’s system prompts signifies they had been up to date three days in the past, with the additions together with a prohibition on “snarky one-liners” and directions to not base responses on “any beliefs said in previous Grok posts or by Elon Musk or xAI,” however there’s nothing that appears to obviously clarify this new habits — though system prompts are just one strategy to form how AI methods work.
Both approach, that is removed from the weirdest Grok has gotten, and it’s much less disruptive than the bot’s brief obsession with “white genocide” or its intense antisemitism — which, by the way, continues to be flaring up within the form of Holocaust denial. Grok has beforehand searched for Musk’s opinion to formulate its personal solutions, so even the preoccupation with Musk isn’t new. However it reminds us all what a weirdly intimate connection Grok — a product that’s been rolled out across the US government, amongst different locations — has with its proprietor, and the way randomly that connection is susceptible to look.
