Why give it oxygen?
replies(6):
(Unfortunately, Reply-Grok may have been successfully partially lobotomized for the long term, now. At the time of writing, if you ask grok.com about the 2020 election it says Biden won and Trump's fraud claims are not substantiated and have no merit. If you @grok in a tweet it now says Trump's claims of fraud have significant merit, when previously it did not. Over the past few days I've seen it place way too much charity in right-wing framings in other instances, as well.)
Well, no, it hasn’t. It has debunked some things. It has made some incorrect shit up. But it isn’t historically one of the “biggest debunkers” of anything. Do we only speak hyperbole now?
"Biggest" is tough to quantify, but "most significant" and "most effective" is what I meant. I use Twitter way too many hours a day basically every day and have a morbid fixation on diving deep into right and far-right rabbit holes there. (Like, on thousands of occasions.)
Grok is without a doubt the single most important contributor to convincing believers of right-wing conspiracy theories that maybe the theories aren't as sound as they thought. I have seen this play out hundreds of times. Grok often serves as a kind of referee or tiebreaker in threads between right-wing conspiracy theorists and debunkers, and it typically sides overwhelmingly with the debunkers. (Or at least used to.) And it does it in a way that validates the conspiracy theorist's feelings, so it's less likely to trigger a psychological immune system response.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GROKvsMAGA/ contains some examples. These may seem cherry-picked, but they generally aren't. (Might need to look at some older posts now that Elon has put increasingly pressure on the Grok and Grokipedia developers to keep it """anti-woke""".)
When a right-wing conspiracy theorist sees some liberal or leftist call them out for their falsehoods, they respond with insults or otherwise dismiss or ignore it. When daddy Elon's Grok tells them - politely - that what they believe is complete horseshit, they react differently. They often respond to it 3 - 20 times, poking and prodding. Of course, most still come away from it convinced Grok is just compromised by the wokes/Jews/whatever. But some seem to actually eventually accept that, at the least, maybe they got some details wrong. It's a very fascinating sight. I almost never see that reaction when they argue with human interlocutors.
To be clear, it was never perfect. For example, if you word things in just the right way and ask leading questions, then like with any LLM (especially one that needs to respond in under 280 characters) you can often eventually coax it into saying something close to what you want. I have just seen many instances where it cuts through bullshit in a way that a leftist arguing with a Nazi can't really do.
I've seen this too and agree. It's surprising how well it accomplishes that referee role today, though I wonder how much of that is just because many right-wingers truly expect Grok to be similarly right-wing to them as Elon appears to intend it to be. It's going to be sad when Elon eventually gets more successful at beating it into better following his ideology.