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Comment by jonnycomputer | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a failure in quality control.

You mean like elons general edgelordness makes you think this wasnt intentional, or at least the intentional inclusion of what is likely a 4chan/8chan/similar corpus? What about the salute? The great white replacement theory promotion? Apartheid opinions? Allowing a mass proliferation of white nationalist and literal nazi twitter premium accounts? At some point, it has to click that musk likely shares these opinions.

The amount of special pleading this guy receives is kind of incredible. Never seen anything like it.

The fact that X is deleting these posts suggests this was unexpected and undesired behavior. Look, I get it, you hate Musk, and we all have good reasons to do it.. I'm not defending the guy. But X is business and this is bad for business.

The unintentional aspect is the lack of communicating in innuendo and dog whistles. Musk and his team can't keep the AI's mask from slipping off and revealing the underlying rottenness in its ideological bias, but that bias itself is completely intentional.

There's a tweet from Musk a week or two ago that they were specifically training Grok to be this way, it really isn't a failure. I mean, throwing nazi salutes and shutting down foreign aid and cancer research has also been bad for Tesla's business, but nevertheless he persists.

He has literally said that he doesn't want business details to interfere with his mission to destroy "the woke mind virus", he literally told advertisers to "go fuck themselves" on this very issue.

> The fact that X is deleting these posts suggests this was unexpected and undesired behavior.

Or they communicated what they wanted to communicate already. Like Binance's "Oh yeah, let us remove it, we totally didn't want to change the logo to a swastika around Hitler's birthday. Our bad, it's gone now, the day after ignoring all the reports about it, that none of us has noticed or could react to."

(even if they didn't want to, they still communicated it given the preexisting context)

It’s in the business moving the Overton window, not making money.

The only "problem" is that it was supposed to get to this point gradually not go all the way in a single leap.

Plus, have you seen X lately? It's a full on Nazi bar at this point. You can't avoid overt racism anymore, it's everywhere and it's not even trying to be subtle anymore. Just blue check users saying that people with dark skin are inferior and should be treated as such and other blue check users agreeing. With positive engagement scores! Even if you've heavily curated your feed and avoid the "for you" cesspool it's inevitable that the replies will have white supremacists promoted all the way to the top.

no, it's on purpose. if you follow what elon does, he is A/B testing and 'fixing' things when it goes viral.

He is doing the worst thing that could happen, leading us (users of x, USA, humanity) into the abyss with his obsession and sickness (yes he is sick and he should go see a therapist)

Obviously that goes beyond quality control, but it's also interesting that they don't have even a basic sanity checking harness before releases. Like a few basic questions checking both the restrictions and basic functionality. Even with their yolo approach otherwise, I'm really surprised they don't have this covered at some point of the pipeline.

Yes. Although I'm getting bombed for my statement, it seems clear to me that its behavior took X by surprise. We all know that Musk wants to make Grok less "woke", but despite the whole salute controversy (which I think is way over played, even if I think Musk is a total chud), I don't think Musk wanted X to be sued to oblivion for publishing graphic rape-fantasies against particular Twitter users (Will Stancil).

They may not have anticipated how blatantly mask-off it'd go, but they absolutely intended to push it in this direction. That's the openly stated goal of their CEO.

You misunderstand. There is no Quality Control you can do for these things. They're ill-conditioned function imitators. Small changes in input, yield massive changes in output. You can't QC that. You can only clean up after it.

Of course you can. Its not as easy as software testing, but you certainly can run it through a gamut of prompts intended to provoke it to act in ways that you find unacceptable. I mean there is a whole field studying and applying AI alignment.

That's completely false. You run evals.

edit: you're supposed to run evals.

really? seems more like intended behavior.

It's totally an accident. It's just an accident that keeps happening...for some reason

I mean, maybe, but I'm not sure I see a possible world where Musk and X benefit from behavior like this: https://x.com/grok/status/1942681404183281887

You’re assuming that Musk, a drug addict who rants about ‘woke mind virus’es at 4am, is a rational actor here? I ask this sincerely, why do you think that?

what would lead you to believe that he operates under such a guideline?

You can't think of anything Musk has done that might suggest a motive here? Really?

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