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.
Unsurprising that the hallucination machines are quickly turning into propaganda machines.
Also unsurprising that the stochastic parrot simulation is fucking up its mission of being a propaganda machine
Stochastic parrot simulators, I like it
It’s important to note that the AI isn’t actually talking about it’s internal system.
It’s predicting how an AI model would reply to this question.
This is something people keep getting confused about LLMs. It’s the same with those viral “I asked Claude to describe how it feels to think about himself and got this amazing reply with analogy and philosophical conundrums!”… Yeah that’s not Claude describing how it feels to be himself, that’s Claude generating a reply based on how people tend to talk about LLMs and the tone you requested (first person).
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There are researchers who can get a glimpse into the inner workings, but it’s absolutely not just asking the AI how it works lol
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 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 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.
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.
Yeah there are much more intelligent takes on this, but they’re arriving at similar conclusions.
https://www.404media.co/why-did-grok-start-talking-about-white-genocide/
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Training LLMs on text which has been generated by an LLM is actually pretty problematic. The model can easily collapse, becoming completely useless. That’s why they always try and source really clean training data, which is becoming increasingly difficult
It’s also fantastic that there are ai honey pot mazes that exist to suck up the AI crawler with data links and bogus data to absolutely screw with their databases
And there are many of them up and working now.
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You’re not training an LLM on text generated by an LLM. You’re training it on 98% real data, and intentionally biasing it by sprinkling in the fake data intermittently.
Where do you get the real data, though? They just scrap data from websites, but now that chatbots have proliferated this will only introduce contaminated data. Keeping it clean would require hiring people to scrub contamination from the data sets.
Where do you get the real data, though? They just scrap data from websites
Great question… Do they “just” scrape data from websites?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/
Keeping it clean would require hiring people to scrub contamination from the data sets.
That’s exactly right.
Big problem with the 3rd world cubical farms - how do you evaluate their performance? You’d have to hire even more people to double-check their work, otherwise people will do the smart thing and cut corners to make their job easier.
Using books is definitely a way to keep out contamination, though.
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Oh, yeah then I agree with above commenter. This would collapse the model.
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Open LLMs are finetuned on partially or fully synthetic data all the time
That’s what I was suggesting.
You explained to me you weren’t talking about “finetuning”, but training on completely synthetic data.
(Fine-tuning happens after the LLM has already been trained)
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Grok continues to be the most based AI out there by continuing to clown on Musk and his goons.
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