Tim Bray on Grokipedia

Why give it oxygen?

To play devil's advocate: Grok has historically actually been one of the biggest debunkers of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories on Twitter, contrary to popular conception. Elon keeps trying to tweak its system prompt to make it less effective at that, but Grokipedia was worth an initial look from me out of curiosity. It took me 10 seconds to realize it was ideologically-motivated garbage and significantly more right-biased than Wikipedia is left-biased.

(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.)

The problem of debunking right-wing misinformation is that it doesn't seem to matter. The consumers of that misinformation want it and those of us who think it's bad for society already know that its garbage.

It feels like we've reached Peak Stupidity but it's clear it can (and likely will) get much worse with AI videos.

Name one.

Some left-coded popular conspiracies:

1. The Iraq war was a plot to steal oil reserves

2. World Economic Forum / IMF intentionally impoverish nations

3. Police across America are systematically hunting and executing Black men (thousands per year), but are protected by racist institutions

4. Trump assassination attempts were false flag operations

5. Big Pharma deliberately hides natural cures for cancer to protect corporate profits