Social media users asked Grok a series of questions about 'white genocide', revealing that the bot was trained to keep mentioning it
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has been frequently bringing up the concept of a “white genocide” in South Africa - even in unrelated conversations - and has said its creators instructed it to treat the concept as both real and racially driven.
When faced with unrelated questions on issues such as enterprise software and building scaffolding, Grok offered false and misleading answers.
As demonstrated by many on X, Grok has been consistently steering conversations towards the controversial topic of an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa, regardless of the original question, highlighting a growing tendency to shift focus to this narrative tied to Musk’s country of origin.
This is entirely correct, and it’s deeply troubling seeing the general public use LLMs for confirmation bias because they don’t understand anything about them. It’s not “accidentally confessing” like the other reply to your comment is suggesting. An LLM is just designed to process language, and by nature of the fact it’s trained on the largest datasets in history, practically there’s no way to know where this individual output came from if you can’t directly verify it yourself.
Information you prompt it with is tokenized, run through a transformer model whose hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters were adjusted according to god only knows how many petabytes of text data (weighted and sanitized however the trainers decided), and then detokenized and printed to the screen. There’s no “thinking” involved here, but if we anthropomorphize it like that, then there could be any number of things: it “thinks” that’s what you want to hear; it “thinks” that based on the mountains of text data it’s been trained on calling Musk racist, etc. You’re talking to a faceless amalgam unslakably feeding on unfathomable quantities of information with minimal scrutiny and literally no possible way to enforce quality beyond bare-bones manual constraints.
There are ways to exploit LLMs to reveal sensitive information, yes, but you have to then confirm that sensitive information is true, because you’ve just sent data into a black box and gotten something out. You can get a GPT to solve the sudoku puzzle, but you can’t then parade that around before you’ve checked to make sure the puzzle is correct. You cannot ever, under literally any circumstance, trust anything a generative AI creates for factual accuracy; at best, you can use it as a shortcut to an answer which you can attempt to verify.
This is entirely correct, and it’s deeply troubling seeing the general public use LLMs for confirmation bias because they don’t understand anything about them.
People aren’t interested in “learning about LLMs”, especially people like artists.
They’re interested in telling Elon Musk to “fuck off”, and when Grok says something bad about Elon it’s very cathartic for them.
They might know it’s feeding their own thoughts back to them, but they don’t care. To people who aren’t in the know, this box Elon is promoting as “objective truth box” is criticizing Elon. That’s a very powerful narrative in a world where he’s taking over the world.
It’s hard to disagree. Elon can go fuck himself. What’s more important to the average person, stopping Elon or understanding the nitty gritty of machine learning?
When artists say AI is stealing, they’re not interested in an explanation about how “its really not”. And if you tried to, they’d feel you’re missing the forest for the trees because their problem with AI isn’t metaphysical philosophy, it’s that it’s hurting their job opportunities.
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This is entirely correct, and it’s deeply troubling seeing the general public use LLMs for confirmation bias because they don’t understand anything about them. It’s not “accidentally confessing” like the other reply to your comment is suggesting. An LLM is just designed to process language, and by nature of the fact it’s trained on the largest datasets in history, practically there’s no way to know where this individual output came from if you can’t directly verify it yourself.
Information you prompt it with is tokenized, run through a transformer model whose hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters were adjusted according to god only knows how many petabytes of text data (weighted and sanitized however the trainers decided), and then detokenized and printed to the screen. There’s no “thinking” involved here, but if we anthropomorphize it like that, then there could be any number of things: it “thinks” that’s what you want to hear; it “thinks” that based on the mountains of text data it’s been trained on calling Musk racist, etc. You’re talking to a faceless amalgam unslakably feeding on unfathomable quantities of information with minimal scrutiny and literally no possible way to enforce quality beyond bare-bones manual constraints.
There are ways to exploit LLMs to reveal sensitive information, yes, but you have to then confirm that sensitive information is true, because you’ve just sent data into a black box and gotten something out. You can get a GPT to solve the sudoku puzzle, but you can’t then parade that around before you’ve checked to make sure the puzzle is correct. You cannot ever, under literally any circumstance, trust anything a generative AI creates for factual accuracy; at best, you can use it as a shortcut to an answer which you can attempt to verify.
People aren’t interested in “learning about LLMs”, especially people like artists.
They’re interested in telling Elon Musk to “fuck off”, and when Grok says something bad about Elon it’s very cathartic for them.
They might know it’s feeding their own thoughts back to them, but they don’t care. To people who aren’t in the know, this box Elon is promoting as “objective truth box” is criticizing Elon. That’s a very powerful narrative in a world where he’s taking over the world.
It’s hard to disagree. Elon can go fuck himself. What’s more important to the average person, stopping Elon or understanding the nitty gritty of machine learning?
When artists say AI is stealing, they’re not interested in an explanation about how “its really not”. And if you tried to, they’d feel you’re missing the forest for the trees because their problem with AI isn’t metaphysical philosophy, it’s that it’s hurting their job opportunities.