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?
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.
(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.)
And what evidence do you have that it is not in fact useful?
> TFA provides evidence of the chatbot being the opposite of useful, beyond telling people to stick things in their butts.
Where?
> Ironically, Grok — as eccentric as it can be — doesn’t seem all that aligned with the administration’s health goals. Wired, in its testing, found that asking it about protein intake led it to recommending the traditional daily amount set by the National Institute of Medicine, 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. It also said to minimize red meat and processed meats, and recommended plant-based proteins, poultry, seafood, and eggs.
Seems pretty useful to me.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, but the question asked was objectively nothing to do with nutrition whatsoever.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/rfk-jr-rock-c...
For example, if you could craft a prompt for this and obtain permission to commit ..say.. white collar crimes, could those crimes be prosecuted ?
As others have pointed out, this article is written in bad faith.
It is an impossible to make something completely fool-proof, those who try underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
> 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.
> 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)
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?
No other government would have chosen Grok, and likely wouldn’t have done this at all to begin with.
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.
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
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.
Journalism does itself no service writing like this and it's exhausting
Bender•2h ago
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.