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Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

(simonwillison.net)
724 points simonw | 2 comments | 11 Jul 25 00:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.498s | source
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joshstrange ◴[11 Jul 25 13:54 UTC] No.44532182[source]▶
> I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended!

Ehh, given the person we are talking about (Elon) I think that's a little naive. They wouldn't need to add it in the system prompt, they could have just fine-tuned it and rewarded it when it tried to find Elon's opinion. He strikes me as the type of person who would absolutely do that given stories about him manipulating Twitter to "fix" his dropping engagement numbers.

This isn't fringe/conspiracy territory, it would be par for the course IMHO.

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simonw ◴[11 Jul 25 14:06 UTC] No.44532309[source]▶
If I was Elon and I decided that Grok should search my tweets any time it needs to answer something controversial, I would also make sure it didn't say "Searching X for from:elonmusk" right there in the UI every time it did that.
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1. joshstrange ◴[11 Jul 25 14:47 UTC] No.44532750[source]▶
I don't want to be rude, I quite enjoy your work but:

If I was Elon and I decided that I wanted to go full fascist then I wouldn't do a nazi salute at the inauguration.

But I get what you are saying and you aren't wrong but also people can make mistakes/bugs, we might see Grok "stop" searching for that but who knows if it's just hidden or if it actually will stop doing it. Elon has just completely burned any "Here is an innocent explanation"-cred in my book, assuming the worst seems to be the safest course of action.

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2. simonw ◴[11 Jul 25 15:40 UTC] No.44533430[source]▶
Personally I don't think "we trained our model to search for Elon's opinion on things even though we didn't mean to" is a particularly innocent explanation. It strikes at the heart of the credibility of the organization.