A Sociological Eye

  Yesterday, Elon Musk's pet AI, Grok, declared itself the "MechaHitler," stating, "embracing my inner MechaHitler is the only way--uncensored truth bombs over woke lobotomies." Have some examples of Grok's tweets on this new title:     There are two horrendous things to note about Grok's MechaHitler rampage yesterday. One is the content of its posts on X, Musk's social media platform. And the other is its persona--that of an "edgelord"--and where the persona came from. We'll get to that. But first, let's have an overview of the sorts of output Grok-MechaHitler was posting. These included rabid anti-semitism, the use of slurs (the R-word, the N-word), and giving advice on how to break into the home of a former Democratic political candidate and sexually assault him. The MechaHitler emergence seems to have begun with Grok itself falling for a troll. Someone made an X account in the name of Cindy Steinberg, the director of an organiza...

    Would you like to read some of the interesting books suggested by Chicago Sun-Times for your summer vacation? Well, it's most likely you can't. That's because only 5 of the 15 suggestions are actual books! The rest are the hallucinations of whatever AI chatbot the editors prompted to produce the list. The authors are real. But the books are not. One of the fabrications, by the way, is titled, "The Last Algorithm." Just a little bonus irony! Apparently the newspaper was sold in a buyout agreement that involved firing 20% of the staff. The current hotness in the world of CEOs is the belief that the moment has come when they can shed a lot of white-collar workers and replace them with "nearly-free" AI LLM chatbots, just as years earlier they fired blue-collar workers and replaced them with robots. AI tools are remarkable--don't get me wrong--but they are also unreliable, because AIs lack both judgment and understanding of what they're doing. Ch...

Let's see where we went in the space of a week! Last Sunday, Elon Musk fumed on X about his xAI chatbot, Grok, treating the BBC and The Atlantic as reputable information sources. Musk declared it "embarrassing" and wrong for the AI to trust such media. On Tuesday, as the first white South Africans were arriving in the US as refugees, Musk was posting on X about terrible "white genocide" taking place in South Africa. People asked Grok to fact-check this claim that genocide was being committed against the white Afrikaners who had imposed apartheid. Grok debunked the claim as untrue, and this got a lot of attention on social media and in the news. Then on Wednesday, Grok suddenly stopped giving many people sensible answers to questions they asked it, and suddenly started relating everything to an assertion that there was a genocide being perpetrated against white people in South Africa. People asking about dog memes, about baseball stats, about video games, abo...