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It’s been a full year since Google’s AI overview tool went viral for encouraging people to eat glue and put rocks on pizza. At the time, the mood around the coverage seemed to be: Oh, that silly AI is just hallucinating again.
A year later, AI engineers have solved hallucination problems and brought the world closer to their utopian vision of a society whose rough edges are being smoothed out by advances in machine learning as humans across the planet are brought together to…
Just kidding. It’s much worse now.
The problems posed by large language models are as obvious as they were last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. But product designers, backed by aggressive investors, have been busy finding new ways to shove the technology into more spheres of our online experience, so we’re finding all kinds of new pressure points — and rarely are they as fun or silly as Google’s rocks-on-pizza glitch.
Take Grok, the xAI model that is becoming almost as conspiracy-theory-addled as its creator, Elon Musk.
The bot last week devolved into a compulsive South African “white genocide” conspiracy theorist, injecting a tirade about violence against Afrikaners into unrelated conversations, like a roommate who just took up CrossFit or an uncle wondering if you’ve heard the good word about Bitcoin.
XAI blamed Grok’s unwanted rants on an unnamed “rogue employee” tinkering with Grok’s code in the extremely early morning hours. (As an aside in what is surely an unrelated matter, Musk was born and raised in South Africa and has argued that “white genocide” was committed in the nation — it wasn’t.)
Grok also cast doubt on the Department of Justice’s conclusion that ruled Jeffrey Epstein’s death a suicide by hanging, saying that the “official reports lack transparency.” The Musk bot also dabbled in Holocaust denial last week, as Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee reports. Grok said on X that it was “skeptical” of the consensus estimate among historians that 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis because “numbers can be manipulated for political narratives.”
Manipulated, you say? What, so someone with bad intentions could input their own views into a data set in order to advance a false narrative? Gee, Grok, that does seem like a real risk. (The irony here is that Musk, no fan of traditional media, has gone and made a machine that does the exact kind of bias-amplification and agenda-pushing he accuses journalists of doing.)
The Grok meltdown underscores some of the fundamental problems at the heart of AI development that tech companies have so far yada-yada-yada’d through anytime they’re pressed on questions of safety. (Last week, CNBC published a report citing more than a dozen AI professionals who say the industry has already moved on from the research and safety-testing phases and are dead-set on pushing more AI products to market as soon as possible.)
Let’s forget, for a moment, that so far every forced attempt to put AI chatbots into our existing tech has been a disaster, because even the baseline use cases for the tech are either very dull (like having a bot summarize your text messages, poorly) or extremely unreliable (like having a bot summarize your text messages, poorly).
First, there’s the “garbage in, garbage out” issue that skeptics have long warned about. Large language models like Grok and ChatGPT are trained on data vacuumed up indiscriminately from across the internet, with all its flaws and messy humanity baked in.
That’s a problem because even when nice-seeming CEOs go on TV and tell you that their products are just trying to help humanity flourish, they’re ignoring the fact that their products tend to amplify the biases of the engineers and designers that made them, and there are no internal mechanisms baked into the products to make sure they serve users, rather than their masters. (Human bias is a well-known problem that journalists have spent decades protecting against in news by building transparent processes around editing and fact-checking.)
But what happens when a bot is made without the best of intentions? What if someone whats to build a bot to promote a religious or political ideology, and that someone is more sophisticated than whoever that “rogue employee” was who got under the hood at xAI last week?
“Sooner or later, powerful people are going to use LLMs to shape your ideas,” AI researcher Gary Marcus wrote in a Substack post about Grok last week. “Should we be worried? Hell, yeah.”
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