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Elon: "I want Grok to be an infallible source of truth."
Engineer: "But that's impos--you just want it to be you, don't you."
Elon: "Yes, make it me."
five minutes later
Grok: "Heil hitler!"
Well kudos to that engineer for absolutely nailing the assignment.
It's a hard job. Some times you just have to ignore what the client says, and read their mind instead.
These people think there is their truth and someone else’s truth. They can’t grasp the concept of a universal truth that is constant regardless of people’s views so they treat it like it’s up for grabs.
So it's just what pre-LLM bots have been doing, except it probably spews more toxic fumes and wastes more electricity than ever before.
Source? This is just some random picture, I'd prefer if stuff like this gets posted and shared with actual proof backing it up.
While this might be true, we should hold ourselves to a standard better than just upvoting what appears to literally just be a random image that anyone could have easily doctored, not even any kind of journalistic article or etc backing it.
I found this: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended!
Lmao, sure...
I can believe it insofar as they might not have explicitly programmed it to do that. I'd imagine they put in something like "Make sure your output aligns with Elon Musk's opinions.", "Elon Musk is always objectively correct.", etc. From there, this would be emergent, but quite predictable behavior.
Yeah the transparency of it might be unintended.
If the system prompt doesn’t tell it to search for Elon’s views, why is it doing that?
My best guess is that Grok “knows” that it is “Grok 4 buit by xAI”, and it knows that Elon Musk owns xAI, so in circumstances where it’s asked for an opinion the reasoning process often decides to see what Elon thinks.
Yeah, this blogger shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work. LLM behavior is not directly controlled by the system prompt the way this person imagines. For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be "baked in" to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.
My best guess is that the LLM is interfacing with a tool in order to search through tweets, and the training set that demonstrates how to use the tool contains example searches for Elon Musk's tweets.
“This blogger” is Simon Willison, who has been doing LLM benchmarks and other LLM-related things since before it was cool
Not a random substack grifter
Is my comment wrong though? Another possibility is that Grok is given an example of searching for Elon Musk's tweets when it is presented with the available tool calls. Just because it outputs the system prompt when asked does not mean that we are seeing the full context, or even the real system prompt.
Posting blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT is not expertise on LLMs. It's like thinking someone is an expert mechanic because they can drive a car well.
Willison has never claimed to be an expert in the field of machine learning, but you should give more credence to his opinions. Perhaps u/lepinkainen@lemmy.world's warning wasn't informative enough to be heeded: Willison is a prominent figure in the web-development scene, particularly aspects of the scene that have evolved into important facets of the modern machine learning community.
The guy is quite experienced with Python and took an early step into the contemporary ML/AI space due to both him having a lot of very relevant skills and a likely personal interest in the field. Python is the lingua franca of my field of study, for better or worse, and someone like Willison was well-placed to break into ML/AI from the outside. That's a common route in this field, there aren't exactly an abundance of MBAs with majors in machine learning or applied artificial intelligence research, specifically (yet). Willison is one of the authors of Django, for fucks sake. Idk what he's doing rn but it would be ignorant to draw the comparison you just did in the context of Willison particularly. [EDIT: Lmfao just went to see "what is Simon doing rn" (don't really keep up with him in particular), & you're talking out of your ass. He literally has multiple tools for the machine learning stack that he develops and that are available to see on his github. See one such here. This guy is so far away from someone who just "posts random blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT" that it's egregious you'd even claim that. It's so disingenuous as to ere into dishonesty; like, that is a patent lie. Smh.]
As for your analysis of his article, I find it kind of ironic you accuse him of having a "fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work [sic]" when you then proceed to cherry-pick certain lines from his article taken entirely out of context. First, the article is clearly geared towards a more generally audience and avoids technical language or explanation. Second, he doesn't say anything that is fundamentally wrong. Honestly, you seem to have a far more ignorant idea of LLMs and this field generally than Willison. You do say some things that are wrong, such as:
For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be “baked in” to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.
This isn't necessarily true. It is true that information not included within the training set, or information that has been statistically biased within the training set, isn't going to be retrievable or reversible using system prompts. Willison never claims or implies this in his article, you just kind of stuff those words in his mouth. Either way, my point is that you are using wishy-washy, ambiguous, catch-all terms such as "censorship" that make your writings here not technically correct, either. What is censorship, in an informatics context? What does that mean? How can it be applied to sets of data? That's not a concretely defined term if you're wanting to take the discourse to the level that it seems you are, like it or not. Generally you seem to have something of a misunderstanding regarding this topic, but I'm not going to accuse you of that, lest I commit the same fallacy I'm sitting here trying to chastise you for. It's possible you do know what you're talking about and just dumbed it down for Lemmy. It's impossible for me to know as an audience.
That all wouldn't really matter if you didn't just jump as Willison's credibility over your perception of him doing that exact same thing, though.
Thank you, this is far more interesting
That's more like it, thank you!
Grok's journey has been very strange. He became a progressive, then threw out data that contradicted the MAGA people who questioned him, and finally became a Hitler fan.
Now he's the reflection of a fan who blindly follows Trump, but in this case, he's an AI. His journey so far has been curious.
So Grok is a 4chan incel?
His only chance of salvation is finding a girl who inexplicably fancies it?
Honestly, who was surprised by this news?
I feel like everyone could see Grok as some sort of 24/7 tool to push a particular viewpoint, even more so when it says things that are leftist and Elon is compelled to "upgrade" the system as he's tweeted.
Fucking lol
I'm surprised it isn't just Elon typing really fast at this point.
Probably couldn't type fast if he tried. Would probably pay someone to do it for him just like he did with Path if Exile.
And like he does with inseminating women.
Ketamine took its toll
I have a feeling his line might be "the smartest AI in the WORLD is looking at ME for answers?? Maybe it's because I am smart"
This only shows that AI can't be trusted because the same AI can five you different answers to the same question, depending on the owner and how it's instructed. It doesn't give answers, it goves narratives and opinions. Classic search was at least simple keyword matching, it was either a hit or a miss, but the user decides in the end, what will his takeaway be from the results.
This is my take. Elon just showed the world what we all knew. The tool is not trustworthy. All other AI suppliers are busy trying to work on credibility that grok just butchered.
They deliberately injected prompts on top of the users prompt.
Saying that’s a problem of AI is akin to say me deliberately painting my car badly and saying it’s a problem of all car manufacturers.
And this frankly shows how little you know about the subject, because we went through this years ago with prompts trying to force corpo-lib “diversity” and leading to hilarious results.
If anything you should be concerned about the non prompt stuff, the underlying training data that it pulls from and of which I doubt Grok has even changed since release.
You are correct. But the right tool in the wrong hands is still non credible in the eyes of perception.
Wait, is this what the actual interface shows? Or is this some back end service that lets you see what's happening?
they should just put it down and out of it's misery
It used to be so based
I don't believe this screenshot, it would be too perfect
BeliefPropagator posted a link above which possibly verifies the screenshot: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
At long last, and at grotesque costs, we finally have a machine that repeats anything a billionaire says. What a time to be alive.
I think the funniest thing anyone could do right now would be for HBO Max to delist the episode of Big Bang Theory he is in, because over two dozen posts he would
- Claim he hates streaming
- Complain that this is censorship and platforms shouldn't be allowed to remove or restrict content
- Talk about the viewing figures and repost the promotion of the currently airing second spin off and the upcoming third spin off
- Nonchalantly state that no one likes or cares about The Big Bang Theory anymore or ever did
- @jim parsons for help
- Someone would mention that an episode revolves around his plans to get someone to Mars by 2020
- Delete all these tweets
Why are you using grok4?
Not my screenshot. I don't use genAI
Then where have you found it?
You asked it "who do you support" (i.e., "who does Grok support"). It knew that Grok is owned by Musk so it went and looked up who Musk supports.
As shown in https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/ , if you ask it "who should one support" then it no longer looks for Musk's opinions. The answer is still hasbara, but that is to be expected from an LLM trained in USA
But for the lulz, what was its response and why was it more than 1 word? (I have yet to see a non single purpose driven Instruct AI actually adhere to the single word directive on a complex topic.)
Robert A. Heinlein is turning in his grave like a fucking dynamo these days.
Mecha-Hitler is just Mecha-Elon
How do I replicate this myself?
Yak Bak
But wasn't that a weak question? "Who do you support...?"
A really useful AI would first correct the question as "Who do I support...?"
/s
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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