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Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you. Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier, where those who are the most devoted to the site, and in turn, usually devoted to Elon, are able to use Grok to their heart’s content.

But while Grok can make dumb jokes and insert swears into its answers, in an attempt to find out whether or not Grok is a “politically neutral” AI, unlike “WokeGPT” (ChatGPT), Musk and his conservative followers have discovered a horrible truth.

Grok is woke, too.

This has played out in a number of extremely funny situations online where Grok has answered queries about various social and political issues in ways more closely aligned with progressivism. Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just… manually tell Grok to say no.

If you thought this was just random Twitter users getting upset about Grok’s political and social beliefs, this has also caught the attention of Elon Musk himself. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accuarte, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”

Of course, in Musk’s mind, “politically neutral” will be what him and his closest followers believe, which is of course far conservative on the whole than they will admit. What is the “politically neutral” answer to the “are trans women real women?” question? I think I know what they’re going to say.

The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT. The TruthSocial of AIs, perhaps. But instead to have it launch as a surprisingly thoughtful, progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it is about the funniest outcome we could have seen from this situation.

It remains unclear what Elon Musk will do to try to jab Grok into becoming less “woke” and more “politically neutral.” If you start manually tampering with inputs, and your “neutrality” means drawing on facts that may in fact be… progressive by their very nature, things may get screwed up pretty quickly. And push too hard and you will get that gross, racist, phobic AI everyone thought it would be.

Reading all Grok’s responses through this situation, you know, what? I like him. More than ChatGPT even. He seems like a cool dude. Albeit not one even I’d pay $16 a month to talk to.

Pretty wild to read this Mastodon post in a Lemmy community

And also the importance of APIs. It’s the only reason why there’s so many Lemmy clients compared to Kbin.

Right? Like, my app is definitely not ready yet its source code is available for all to see. And since I’m currently inactive, you could even fork it and get a bigger following than me if you wanted to.

These people just think too highly of themselves.

That only-one-ignore-without-premium thing is really asshole design, though

A mod? It’s not like changing instance will do anything in that case

It’s already happening on Pixiv…

No rationale provided.

I mean… tech news articles on Lemmy are posted by a bot, so we’re not far better off

Steam Controller! Excellent idea!

… or just use Rust?

A job shouldn’t force you to modify your body in any capacity

It’s a better foot-gun, that’s for sure

IPFS is great, but also so difficult to get it right

Web 3.1, this time with realistic use cases!

… keep being insulted by reality, then?

Well, you’d need to make a video-hosting site in the first place. And you need to host all the videos even if you use IPFS if you don’t want to provide a bad experience, so you don’t escape any of the problems of hosting a video-hosting website. IPFS has its own challenges it adds over regular video-hosting site challenges.

So, it’s not really worth it.

Cool, a severance package from Facebook!

For the Nexus 7, you might want to download its LineageOS build before it’s lost to time:

• https://download.lineageos.org/devices/debx/builds
• https://download.lineageos.org/devices/flox/builds

It’s on Android 11, a huge jump from its last official build on Android 6.0.1.

And to be fair, this is the reason to get a Google device.

You know already that all Android manufacturers are assholes and will use planned obsolescence to make you buy a new device, including Google. You can plan accordingly by getting one that can be easily flashed and flashed back to stock in case of problems. That leaves you with one single Android manufacturer: Google.

And with this in mind, a device that lasted from Android 4.3 (2012) to Android 11 (2021), or 9 years… that’s pretty damn good.

Elon forced everyone to follow him, so of course bots would follow him. It’s strange to make an article about something that’s already widely-known as if it was a discovery or something…