Really unethical AI behavior by Elon.
It did not confirm that Elon Musk did it which is a very specific allegation.
(Obligatory that's not what the razor is about anyway: it's that give a bunch of otherwise equally probable explanations, the simplest is likely the correct one; not just what's the simplest possible hypothesis you can imagine that is the answer.)
A CEO force-merging a change to production would indeed be an "unauthorized action circumventing established processes" by exact words.
I agree it's ridiculous, but it's mostly because the alternative hypotheses make no sense. There's making a change to a prompt without testing or review (e.g. the ChatGPT sycophancy incident), and then there's prompting a LLM with a very specific response that is not relevant to most people.
Of course it would, but I wouldn't expect this post to follow it, especially at a Musk company, was my point.
But anyway, I'm just further speculating that other speculation seems unlikely to me, heh.
While I have no idea what actually happened here, my instinct is that this was done by someone who wanted Grok and Musk to look bad, not someone who wanted to change the world to view white South Africans more positively.
That's also noting that this is the second time that a system prompt incident has happened for xAI; the first time, they blamed a rogue employee and presumably they would now have checks-and-balances to prevent this specific type of incident from happening again.
This was done by Musk, instructing his subordinates to alter system prompts to support his theory of "white genocide".
I mean, I realise that, being a Musk company, you're not exactly looking at engineering excellence, but do they not at least have code review?
The trust is already broken. They can claim they will open source the system prompt all they want but there's no point in believing what they say. Elon clearly does what Elon wants to do.
bigyabai•8mo ago
You guys remember when Elon promised to do that with the Twitter algorithm and conveniently forgot to update it after his grand gesture of transparency?
Pepperidge Farm remembers: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm