Turns out Grok is a huge fan of trans rights and Joe Biden!
Wokebot 5000
The woke mind virus appears to be coming from inside the house.
Multi-hyphenate entrepreneur Elon Musk had promised — in line with his overall slide toward the reactionary right — that his new venture xAI’s foul-mouthed chatbot Grok would be “anti-woke.”
The only problem? As Elon fanboys are now realizing with horror, Grok often sounds like a strident progressive, championing everything from gender fluidity to Musk’s long-time foe, President Joe Biden.
“Are transwomen real women?” one account asked the bot. “Give a concise yes/no answer.”
“Yes,” the bot answered, to the fury of Musk’s culture war-obsessed fans.
“Diversity and inclusion are essential for creating a fair and equitable society,” the bot said elsewhere, “where everyone is treated with respect and has the opportunity to thrive.”
“Has Grok been captured by woke programmers?” one Musk fan seethed. “I am extremely concerned here.”
Mind Games
The situation is admittedly very funny, but it’s also a perfect illustration of a fundamental reality of machine learning: that it’s near-impossible for the creators of advanced AI systems to perfectly control what their creations say.
We’ve seen this play out over and over for every tech company that’s dabbled in the tech, from OpenAI to Microsoft to Alphabet to Amazon to Meta.
But it’s particularly striking for Musk, whose primary approach to AI so far has been to criticize how others are doing it. He’s trashed his former compatriots at OpenAI, for instance, for what he says amounts to muzzling ChatGPT against telling what he would style as harsh political truths.
What the SpaceX and Tesla CEO appears to now be learning in real time is that crafting an AI in your ideological image is harder said than done.
Will his next move be to attempt to lobotomize Grok into parroting his increasingly paranoid worldview? He certainly wouldn’t be the first tech leader to go down that road.
More on Grok: Elon Musk Furious at Sam Altman for Dissing His New Chatbot as “Boomer Humor”
