This is an example of why you shouldn't link to X or anything that looks like X.
Here you've got some guy who is talking to himself while pretending he's talking to others, not giving enough frame to understand what really happened. It looks like he showed it a picture and Grok started blabbing about "farm attacks" but what do I know?
Move on folks, nothing more to see here.
jsheard•4h ago
I linked via xcancel to get around the login wall, and it seems clear enough to me? The OP posted a photo, someone else pinged Grok to ask where it is, and Grok went off on a tangent about SA farm attacks apropos of absolutely nothing.
IMO it's notable because it looks an awful lot like Elon Musk rigging xAI to aggressively push his own talking points, ineptly for now, but it'll only get harder to spot.
pvg•4h ago
It still doesn't seem very interesting, even assuming the theory is right. Like, what's the interesting conversation you envision would happen here?
pavel_lishin•4h ago
It's not an interesting conversation. It's a live example of what's happening with grok right now, and it's not hard to parse:
1. Person A posts something
2. Person B calls @grok to weigh in
3. @grok starts babbling about South Africans
PaulHoule•3h ago
It probably is representative of training data based on Musk’s bent world view but doesn’t come across as effective propaganda. If it said some particular farmer got attacked at a particular time and it happens at a certain rate or so and so threatened more attacks or something it might be persuasive. As it is it just looks like an unhinged part of the cringiverse.
tracker1•3h ago
It could also be based on what Grok is being fed from the users... IIRC, there was an early AI bot from Microsoft intended to have the mentality of a young teen, and within a couple days, the bot was a racist slut just from interactions.
It depends on how the bot takes in the information it is interacting with, not necessarily the directions of a single person...
I mean, someone asks, "What's going on with the farmer's in South Africa?" and the bot has seen all the unhinged posts about the topic, and injects that information into the position.
It's not necessarily malice, but yet another example of why I generally don't trust AI platforms and would reject actions based on AI results without external validation.
pvg•2h ago
I'm not having trouble parsing it, I'm asking what would make this an interesting HN post.
sanderjd•1h ago
It looks like the system prompt may have been modified, or that it may be some kind of attack on the system prompt, or possibly someone attacking the training data, or it may be totally organic somehow, in which case it's still interesting how topics can leak into responses to unrelated questions.
These are all interesting topics for the crowd on HN to weigh in on.
If I searched for some arbitrary thing on Google right now and the AI generated results gave me a bunch of unrelated slop about South Africa, we would certainly be discussing how that might have happened. This is no different.
pvg•42m ago
'Musk fiddles with twitter to match his weird views' is a very repetitive story that's been on HN a bunch, including recently so I guess I don't see the interestingness in this case.
The 'attack' thing is your gloss, I don't see it appearing in any of the reporting.
PaulHoule•4h ago
It doesn't matter whether it is Mastodon or the "archive.today of X", almost anything contentious on those platforms turns into an infinite regress of finger pointing.
I think the first I heard of "gamergate" was that some guy, maybe in Maine, seemed to think that a bunch of radical feminists flipped over his car but it was an incredible story told from the viewpoint of somebody who already knows the moral status (always double plus good or double plus ungood) of 1000s of people.
People who are addicted to those platforms seem completely oblivious to it but the user interface on all of them for threaded discussions is terrible.
staticman2•3h ago
>think that a bunch of radical feminists flipped over his car
Like the cartoon character She-Hulk? That's a funny image.
PaulHoule•1h ago
My image is that either (1) it was a lot of people or (2) he did it himself or (3) was suffering from delusions.
jsheard•4h ago
https://xcancel.com/grok/status/1922668715533083121
https://xcancel.com/grok/status/1922651218595439063
PaulHoule•4h ago
Here you've got some guy who is talking to himself while pretending he's talking to others, not giving enough frame to understand what really happened. It looks like he showed it a picture and Grok started blabbing about "farm attacks" but what do I know?
Move on folks, nothing more to see here.
jsheard•4h ago
IMO it's notable because it looks an awful lot like Elon Musk rigging xAI to aggressively push his own talking points, ineptly for now, but it'll only get harder to spot.
pvg•4h ago
pavel_lishin•4h ago
PaulHoule•3h ago
tracker1•3h ago
It depends on how the bot takes in the information it is interacting with, not necessarily the directions of a single person...
I mean, someone asks, "What's going on with the farmer's in South Africa?" and the bot has seen all the unhinged posts about the topic, and injects that information into the position.
It's not necessarily malice, but yet another example of why I generally don't trust AI platforms and would reject actions based on AI results without external validation.
pvg•2h ago
sanderjd•1h ago
These are all interesting topics for the crowd on HN to weigh in on.
If I searched for some arbitrary thing on Google right now and the AI generated results gave me a bunch of unrelated slop about South Africa, we would certainly be discussing how that might have happened. This is no different.
pvg•42m ago
The 'attack' thing is your gloss, I don't see it appearing in any of the reporting.
PaulHoule•4h ago
I think the first I heard of "gamergate" was that some guy, maybe in Maine, seemed to think that a bunch of radical feminists flipped over his car but it was an incredible story told from the viewpoint of somebody who already knows the moral status (always double plus good or double plus ungood) of 1000s of people.
People who are addicted to those platforms seem completely oblivious to it but the user interface on all of them for threaded discussions is terrible.
staticman2•3h ago
Like the cartoon character She-Hulk? That's a funny image.
PaulHoule•1h ago
throwaway48476•28m ago