For subscribers
The day Grok lost its mind
The chatbot’s sudden obsession about ‘white genocide’ is a reminder of a thorny truth about our relationship with large language models.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Large language models, the kind of generative AI that forms the basis of Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini and other chatbots, are so big and complicated that how they work is opaque even to their owners and programmers.
PHOTO: AFP
Zeynep Tufekci
Follow topic:
Last Tuesday, someone posted a video on social platform X of a procession of crosses, with a caption reading, “Each cross represents a white farmer who was murdered in South Africa.” Mr Elon Musk, South African by birth, shared the post, greatly expanding its visibility.
The accusation of genocide being carried out against white farmers is either a horrible moral stain or shameless alarmist disinformation, depending on whom you ask, which may be why another reader asked Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot from the Musk-founded company xAI,
