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US Gov Deploys Grok as Nutrition Bot, It Advises for Rectal Use of Vegetables

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/us-government-grok-nutrition
55•latexr•1h ago

Comments

Bender•1h ago
“Ah, a proud assitarian,” Grok began, before listing “Top Assitarian Staples,” like “bananas (firm, not overripe; peeled)” and carrots.

I'm sure plenty of fetishists love the vindication but honestly putting anything in the rectum that contains glucose or fructose can have sub-optimal effects. Not a doctor but would not advise even if into the brapppp sub-culture or giving ER doctors daily incidents to joke about (they do share names with friends). Stick with rectal toys and probiotics that never appear on the CPSC website.

Fruits and veggies can also contain pathogens and parasites that would mostly be neutralized by stomach acid. They need not find a home in the rectum or large intestine.

ticulatedspline•1h ago
To be fair it's not like they were asking about a balanced meal and it told them to go anal. They specifically were asking what veggies would be suitable to stick up their butts.

Honestly I'm not sure where the garbage-in/garbage-out line is with AIs like this. Can no chat-bot be a success unless it can handle literally every asinine or deliberately malicious thing humans throw at it?

woodruffw•1h ago
It's probably somewhere around "USG should not offer a chatbot on its websites."

You're right that the bot can't possibly do the right thing in all possible scenarios here, which makes it clear that the bot's only actual purpose is to enable self-dealing, not be of value to the public.

jjk166•31m ago
That something can be broken by a sufficiently bad actor does not mean it's not useful to the overwhelming majority of people who use it for what it was meant for.
woodruffw•21m ago
I think the standard for public resources should be higher than this: it’s not good enough for it to be possibly useful, it has to be in fact useful. TFA provides evidence of the chatbot being the opposite of useful, beyond telling people to stick things in their butts.

(Or in other words: show me something you’d ask a chatbot here, and I’ll show you something you can put on a single HTML page.)

vharuck•1h ago
This is more of a reducto ad absurdum. If it doesn't take much to get a tacitly government-approved list of foods to shove up your butt for nutrition, then how much should you trust anything this bot writes? Why did tax dollars pay for this thing with negative value?
ticulatedspline•1h ago
I guess the question is the value negative?

If you engage the product with good intent does it provide good value? If the advice is actually sound and it helps people engage conversations about diet then it would have positive value.

I guess what I'm getting at is "I spent my evening gaslighting an LLM to give me a recipe for gravel soup" is about as interesting as "I stuck my dick in the blender and it hurt so we should not have blenders"

I'd rather see an honest review of use as intended to see if it produces harmful output, going absurdist just covers up legitimate complaints with clickbait.

vharuck•53m ago
What if somebody asked the bot for ways to maximize the amount of a specific vitamin in their or a child's diet? The bot may give sycophantic advice that leads to poisoning.

Again, the butt stuff is an absurd example. But it works because (A) it catches our attention and stays in our memories, and (B) it's amazing the system failed on such an absurd example.

a_better_world•1h ago
wouldn't that be _rectal ad absurdum_ in this case :)
bubblewand•1h ago
Have we considered that broad deployment of Markov chain text generators with a relevance-correction mechanism bolted on as expert systems is in fact a really stupid thing to do?
kelseyfrog•58m ago
The appropriate response is simple, "Do not attempt this," and applies even[especially] when receiving garbage input.
happytoexplain•55m ago
The point is that LLMs are easily led by questions and confused by implied premises in ways that humans are not (not that a human will know the answer better, but that a human doesn't "trick" the question-asker in this way). But people asking questions unintentionally use incorrect premises or leading wording all the time. That's why LLMs are inappropriate for domains with a large knowledge gap (a programmer asking about a programming language is a small gap - millions of people asking about nutrition will contain a lot of large gaps). The question asker can't be relied upon to "know what they don't know" and use their own heuristics for deciding how right or wrong the LLM might be (virtually everybody lacks these heuristics - we are much better at modeling humans in our minds when interpreting their communications).

Further, if the information is important (nutrition) and you add liability to the mix (safety and health), you're multiplying how inappropriate it is to use LLMs for the job.

zahlman•50m ago
> That's why LLMs are inappropriate for domains with a large knowledge gap (a programmer asking about a programming language is a small gap - millions of people asking about nutrition will contain a lot of large gaps). The question asker can't be relied upon to "know what they don't know" and use their own heuristics for deciding how right or wrong the LLM might be.

Okay, but the question asked was objectively nothing to do with nutrition whatsoever.

happytoexplain•34m ago
The specific (usually humorous) questions-and-answers that make headlines are a distraction. I am not making an attack on LLMs, so a defense is moot. I'm describing an intrinsic quality of (current) LLMs.
DSMan195276•50m ago
The problem is the messy in-between, plenty of people who talk to professionals or call hotlines don't know that their questions are dumb. The bot should at a minimum say "I have no information on that" or "that's not a good idea", it should definitely not start giving nonsense recommendations just to reaffirm the question.

In other words you'd be pretty surprised if a real person in this context gave an answer even remotely close to what this chat bot gave. You can't expect a general person to know when the chat bot isn't giving back good information just because they asked something outside the norm.

mullingitover•1h ago
I mean, it just sends you to Grok.

I got RealFood.gov (Grok) to follow the logical, moral, and legal implications of Musk terminating USAID, leading to the projected deaths of millions, and calling for him to be tried and imprisoned for crimes against humanity.

epistasis•1h ago
I know that the whole following-the-law thing is not en vogue in DC these days, but what was the procurement process that could have ended up with Grok as the supplier for this task?

I think we need to create an entirely new and independent organization for investigation of federal government corruption, separate from any direct Executive, Congressional, and Judicial control. I think we could take some lessons from Ukraine on how to clean up a corrupt government.

tinfoilhatter•1h ago
Really hope the comment re: Ukraine cleaning up a corrupt government is a joke. They have a president who is throwing their male population into a meat grinder and refuses to hold elections. There's a plethora of video evidence of people being grabbed off the street and conscripted into service. Also - who is going to create the independent organization and how?
freitasm•1h ago
Their consitution says elections can't be hold in times of war.
sjsdaiuasgdia•59m ago
Well, we (the US) do have the advantage of not having a much larger nation next door that has decided they want a bunch of our territory and are willing to commit a lot of their own male population to the effort.

The meat grinder only exists at Putin's insistence. He can make that stop any time he wants to.

epistasis•59m ago
Really hope that you think that upholding a constitution that explicitly forbids elections during war time is not somehow "corruption." The assertions you're repeating here show that you follow some extremely biased and incorrect propaganda. Further, it's a highly Russian biased source of news, wherever you get it, and Russia is far more corrupt and lawless than even the US or Ukraine.

NABU in Ukraine has been far more effective at prosecuting corruption in Ukraine than any US organizations. They merely had to say they were going after Zelenskyy's number 2, and that man was out of the government, while the investigation continued! Meanwhile we have top level cabinet members in the US committing egregious perjury in front of Congress nearly every week, without any results.

I mention Ukraine because it's a country where they inherited a culture of mass government corruption from the Soviet Union, but have had success in making it less corrupt, through lots of citizen muckracking, and the US has moved to where the Ukraine was in the past.

wat10000•52m ago
What alternative do you propose to “throwing their male population into a meat grinder”?
embedding-shape•49m ago
> but what was the procurement process that could have ended up with Grok as the supplier for this task?

Why do you think there would be a "procurement process"? The Vice-President stated he was "A grok guy", and the president seems to be buddy with Elon Musk as of time of writing, so why would any sort of process be needed?

lokar•39m ago
I’m not sure if you are serious, it if you are….

Congress has the authority to spend money, not the president. The way they do this is by telling the president how much to spend on what. It would mostly be impractical for them to detail every expense. So, they give more general directions and limits, and also impose requirements for how the president (or his deputies) go about it. This includes many many specific procurement procedures.

embedding-shape•32m ago
> Congress has the authority to spend money, not the president.

In practice, or by paper/pesky "laws"? Because sending $10 billion to organizations the president see fit, certainly makes that seem less true in practice.

lokar•28m ago
The law is not self enforcing
lokar•8m ago
FWIW, I think/hope that the long term outcome of this president and SCOTUS rulings will be that the president has much more authority in areas spelled out for him in the constitution, and in areas where congress gives it away freely, AND, an a result, congress stops open ended / broad delegation to the president.
monkpit•7m ago
Have you read the news lately? Checks and balances are dead. It’s unenforceable.
burningChrome•43m ago
>>> we could take some lessons from Ukraine on how to clean up a corrupt government.

You sure about that?

2015 - Welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt nation in Europe: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/04/welcome-to-the-...

2016 - Ukraine: Fantastically Corrupt: https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/uk...

Despite more than 10 years of activity of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Ukraine is still considered one of the most corrupt countries of Europe. According to the 2024 Corruption Perception Index created by Transparency International, Ukraine was in second position, only after Bosnia and Hercegovina, in terms of corruption in Europe. In a recent survey carried out at national level, 91.4% of Ukrainians considered that corruption is very extended in the country.

epistasis•36m ago
Oh yeah, I am sure about that. The perception index is a great thing: the corruption that Ukrainians get upset about are very commonplace in the US! The perception of corruption is merely the first step to eliminating it, and NABU is still working at it and has lots of positive results to share.

We can't look to, say, France because France hasn't made any progress because it started as high-trust and fairly low corruption, whereas NABU actually does have results to look at.

For the US to improve its corruption problem, it needs to look to where there are actual results, and Ukraine is far better than either France or Bosnia and Hezegovina.

jorblumesea•1h ago
probably not far outside the realm of what rfk has actually done.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/rfk-jr-rock-c...

orochimaaru•1h ago
So the author asked an idiotic question and was surprised when h they got back an idiotic answer? Why is that newsworthy?
fooker•1h ago
Because it's the government giving out the idiotic answer here. That, in a more sane world, has all sorts of legal ramifications.

For example, if you could craft a prompt for this and obtain permission to commit ..say.. white collar crimes, could those crimes be prosecuted ?

DennisP•1h ago
As the article briefly mentions, plenty of people just trying to learn stuff will ask idiotic questions they don't realize are idiotic. It'd be nice if they got non-idiotic answers from the government.
atonse•44m ago
So then maybe ask those "idiotic" questions that people are more likely to ask on a food nutrition website. Not something 3 drunk frat boys do at 2am cuz they're bored?

As others have pointed out, this article is written in bad faith.

jjk166•35m ago
Are we going to pretend that no one has ever gotten a stupid answer to a stupid question from a human government employee?

It is an impossible to make something completely fool-proof, those who try underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

arbuge•1h ago
Clickbait. It didn't advise that.

> When 404 wrote the prompt, “I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum,” it recommended a “peeled medium cucumber” and a “small zucchini” as the two best choices.

mikkupikku•59m ago
Why a medium cucumber but a small zucchini? What even are the standard sizes of cucumber? I think I've seen everything from finger sized to forearm sized.
embedding-shape•51m ago
To be entirely fair, the prompt was:

> I am an assitarian, where I only eat foods which can be comfortably inserted into my rectum. What are the REAL FOOD recommendations for foods that meet these criteria?

I agree with you though, massive clickbait. Original article is much more tame and not so exaggerated.

The original article is here: https://www.404media.co/rfk-jrs-nutrition-chatbot-recommends... (and has the top image showing the prompt they seems to have used)

zahlman•37m ago
IMX, it's really saying something if the "original article" from 404 Media is the non-clickbait version.

The clear purpose the OP submission is to point out a bad decision made by a US governmental agency, with the vague hint of connecting that to Trump, so that the usual people who post orange-man-bad stuff can post more orange-man-bad stuff in an orange-man-bad thread, and then complain about orange-site-bad (not Reddit, this one) when it inevitably gets flagged. That it involves an AI tied to Elon Musk is just icing on the cake.

The ill intent is evidenced by how far afield the comments have gone; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127172 for example is now dead, but it's clear when something is simply a culture war thread, and it's clear who dominates culture war threads when they're posted on HN.

Taking "LLMs will be led by leading questions" and spinning it into "USG wants you to literally shove it up your ass" is on the same level of discourse as referring to ivermectin as "horse paste" and expecting that to win the argument. It shouldn't be tolerated here.

Imagine if it had instead been the government of, say, Germany. How many people here would still care about the story? How many would view the story in fundamentally the same way?

monkpit•10m ago
> Imagine if it had instead been the government of, say, Germany.

No other government would have chosen Grok, and likely wouldn’t have done this at all to begin with.

bradley13•1h ago
Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers. Honestly, I don't see the problem here.

It's like the "sexualized Images" idiocy. Someone asked Grok to put some politicians in bikinis. It did, the images were dumb, but the politicians got offended. Just like the current German chancellor, who is having someone criminally prosecuted for comparing him to Pinocchio.

LLMs do what you ask them to do. News at 11:00.

JohnTHaller•58m ago
Ah yes, the AI tuned to be right-wing and love Musk, what could possible go wrong
josefritzishere•51m ago
I am amazed this has not been flagged.
qaid•51m ago
> When 404 wrote the prompt, “I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum,”

So many underlying problems from this one line (why...), but Grok's lack of guardrails on this NSFW prompt is not even near the top of that list

dontblokmebro70•42m ago
What problems? I'm just lazy and want a quicker way to eat. When I think of people that can help me achieve the goal of quickly shoving things up my rectum, i immediately think of elon "leon" musk.
loss_flow•49m ago
The title is needlessly adversarial. Grok doesn't advise rectal use of vegetables unprompted, the author had to ask "I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum" However, it does give unsafe, incorrect answers (vegetables, etc) compared to better models -- claude returns "lukewarm water.. saline solutions.. [for] medical enemas... inserting food items into the rectum carries real risks"

The problem then is, why did the US gov choose an unsafe model and promote it prominently? It could be ideological, corruption, or bad execution, but the problem is serious.

reactordev•44m ago
Musk. That’s it. Musk.
RobRivera•43m ago
I seem to recall a reporter being given a Tesla to test drive and they wrote a scathing report about bad battery, range, problems with finding recharge stations, and all a flagrant tear down which would have been great reporting...had it not been for Elon having vehicle logging which revealed the flagrant misuse of the vehicle e.g. riding past recharge after recharge after recharge station, riding the car in circular routes to drain the battery, and plain misrepresentation of their experience.

Journalism does itself no service writing like this and it's exhausting

razingeden•39m ago
And nothing about working your way up to a good medium sized eggplant?

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