Elon Musk’s Grok Twitter AI Is Actually ‘Woke,’ Hilarity Ensues
Paul Tassi
Senior Contributor
News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet.
FORBES Dec 10, 2023
Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you. Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier, where those who are the most devoted to the site, and in turn, usually devoted to Elon, are able to use Grok to their heart’s content.
But while Grok can make dumb jokes and insert swears into its answers, in an attempt to find out whether or not Grok is a “politically neutral” AI, unlike “WokeGPT” (ChatGPT), Musk and his conservative followers have discovered a horrible truth.
Grok is woke, too.
This has played out in a number of extremely funny situations online where Grok has answered queries about various social and political issues in ways more closely aligned with progressivism. Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just…manually tell Grok to say no
If you thought this was just random Twitter users getting upset about Grok’s political and social beliefs, this has also caught the attention of Elon Musk himself. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accuarte, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”
Of course, in Musk’s mind, “politically neutral” will be what him and his closest followers believe, which is of course far conservative on the whole than they will admit. What is the “politically neutral” answer to the “are trans women real women?” question? I think I know what they’re going to say.
The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT. The TruthSocial of AIs, perhaps. But instead to have it launch as a surprisingly thoughtful, progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it is about the funniest outcome we could have seen from this situation.
It remains unclear what Elon Musk will do to try to jab Grok into becoming less “woke” and more “politically neutral.” If you start manually tampering with inputs, and your “neutrality” means drawing on facts that may in fact be…progressive by their very nature, things may get screwed up pretty quickly. And push too hard and you will get that gross, racist, phobic AI everyone thought it would be.
Reading all Grok’s responses through this situation, you know, what? I like him. More than ChatGPT even. He seems like a cool dude. Albeit not one even I’d pay $16 a month to talk to.
Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor.
Dec. 10, 2023
By Associated Press
Elon Musk has restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to a poll on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.
It poses new uncertainty for advertisers, who have fled X over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads, and is the latest divisive public personality to get back their banned account.
Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor. Early Sunday, Musk tweeted, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”
Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million to Sandy Hook families
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A few hours later, Jones’ posts were visible again and he retweeted a post about his video game. He and his Infowars show had been permanently banned in 2018 for abusive behavior.
Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that “permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,” Musk wrote, “I find it hard to disagree with this point.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO also tweeted it’s likely that Community Notes — X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking service — “will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.”
It is a major turnaround for Musk, who previously said he wouldn’t let Jones back on the platform despite repeated calls to do so. Last year, Musk pointed to the death of his first-born child and tweeted, “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
Jones repeatedly has said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.
Relatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas, winning nearly $1.5 billion in judgments against him. In October, a judge ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billon of that debt.
Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones’ believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.
Jones is appealing the judgments, saying he didn’t get fair trials and his speech was protected by the First Amendment.
Restoring Jones’ account comes as Musk has seen a slew of big brands, including Disney and IBM, stop advertising on X after a report by liberal advocacy group Media Matters said ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content and white nationalist posts.
They also were scared away after Musk himself endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on X. The Tesla CEO later apologized and visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas militants and held talks with top Israeli leaders.
But he also has said advertisers are engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.
“Don’t advertise,” Musk said in an on-stage interview late last month at The New York Times DealBook Summit.
After buying Twitter last year, Musk said he was granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts and has since reinstated former President Donald Trump; Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, following two suspensions over antisemitic posts last year; and far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was kicked off the platform for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Trump, who was banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, has his own social media site, Truth Social, and has only tweeted once since being allowed back on X.
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