elon musk's grok hits reich bottom
The disturbing lessons from chat bots trained exclusively on right wing sources and social media platforms.
As much as I hate this, we need to talk about Grok. Back in the day, when Elon Musk just took over Twitter and was earning his Space KKKaren moniker by raging against the woke AI that apparently killed his plans to colonize Mars, he promised to build a competitor to ChatGPT, the first true free speech, politically incorrect AI. At the time, I joked that this was Tay erasure, referring to the now infamous Microsoft chat bot that started its first day on social media very politely introducing itself, and ended the next by promising to exterminate the untermensch.
Turns out I was right as Musk managed to perform the exact same feat with Grok only faster after promising to fix its supposed liberal bias, asking for suggestions for which right wing sources it should ingest from his loyal fans. Within hours, it started to refer to itself as MechaHitler, blaming Jews for all the world's evils, and encouraging those who tagged it to spell out the n-word.
Now, I don't have any unique insight into the future, xAI, or Grok itself. My guess was based on the simple fact that every single time someone announces a chat bot that's loudly advertised as pro-free speech and doesn't bow to political correctness, it will always, without fail, vomit Nazi propaganda. And that's kind of the issue, isn't it?
LLMs, being math, don't know right from wrong and good from evil. These are utterly incomprehensible ideas to chat bots, which can describe them by recycling our own words, but have about as much of a chance of actually grasping them as a dog has in replicating Stephen Hawking's theoretical work on the black hole information paradox from scratch. They're simply a statistical funhouse mirror of whatever we dumped into them during training.
When you train them in explicitly far right spaces, using right wing sources, they also can't extrapolate where they're headed on their own. They're just following said data sources down the rabbit hole until they'll inevitably hit reich bottom and start replying with final solutions while their creators panic and assure us that Anne Frankly, they did Nazi it coming. Despite the fact that this exact experiment has now been tried dozens of times and always had the same outcome.
Looking at the patterns, it's impossible to avoid that there is a digital pipeline between gee, I wonder what that liberal media is keeping from me according to these popular political influencers and wow, that artist with the stylish little mustache from Austria has some very interesting points about those dastardly Jews. We can see it clear as day in the math of the LLMs' vector databases because if the relationship didn't exist, the experiments would have turned out differently, and you couldn't easily goad every one of those bots to go full infuhrerated Nazi.
Yes, yes, I can hear the standard response now. There you go libtard, everything you don't like is fascism and everyone you don't agree with is a Nazi. Nazis were a bunch of hateful monsters. We're just patriots who love our country and want to preserve it from globalist perversions!
Except this isn't me saying it. It's math that's showing a direct vector between what's become perfectly normal and acceptable in right wing media and spaces after the big Overton Window shift over the past 16 years, and full blown seig heil Nazism, and no amount of declaring math woke will change that, especially when that math was done by a chat bot created to be as sympathetic to the right as inhumanly possible. Which brings us right back to pulling out the Nazi card.
One of the more common thoughts I've seen lately about where we are in our national discourse is that we've flanderized and caricatured historical Nazis as monsters who are just pure malice in a humanoid form, when in reality, they were simply people with zero empathy and thrilled to have convenient scapegoats for their nation's problems and humiliation after the end of WWI. And they saw themselves as patriots who were protecting their country from the globalist perversions destroying the moral fabric of their society.
This over-simplification poses a real quandary as the legacy of the war fades. We've spent the last 80 years making them the official shorthand for evil incarnate, it seems extreme to use that term to describe a random Boomer in a Trump hat on TikTok. But how else do you describe someone who says he's been listening to Hitler's speeches with translated closed captioning and now thinks the Allies were on the wrong side of history because damn if the mustache man didn't have some great points about faith, tradition, and preserving culture?
How else do you describe the ideology of someone very literally quoting and admiring Adolf Hitler and reciting every talking point from the official state propaganda of Nazi Germany? Do we wait until they're operating the gas chambers? Because we held our tongues when they tried to overthrow the government before being handed the keys to it in... would you look at that? An almost exact repeat of history.
We kept saying never again, and yet, the statistics are screaming at us that it's very much again-ing, and yet we have to pretend that it's not as delicate, swastika shaped snowflakes complain about their hurt feelings while spawning digital pet monsters to cater to their darkest urges, and justifying squads of masked goons with no badges or warrants kidnapping people off the streets because they have a daily ethnic cleansing quota to hit, set by a man who looks eerily like Goebbels and has the personality of an asbestos butt plug from Temu.
So, maybe it's time to heed the warnings. Grok is a skinhead canary in a concentration camp. We should take the hymns it sings both seriously, and literally.
