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XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

arstechnica.com

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Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#51

Post by ujkhsjkdhf234 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #13
sigmaisaletter wrote: post #2

> maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct It is certainly and undoubtedly a big coincidence that his happens to the chatbot of a white South African just when the topic is in the news again due to Trump's granting refugee status to some white South African farmers.

[flagged]

White South Africans only trauma is that apartheid no longer exist. South Africa has the largest wealth disparity with 0.1% of South Africans taking 25% of the wealth. I can tell you those 0.1% aren't black.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#52

Post by gpcr1949 »

incomingpain wrote: post #41

The linked Musk comment where a minor political leader is singing kill the white farmers: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2024-05-30-julius... Supreme court ruled that it was not hate speech. In context, south africa has been expropriating land from white owners due to historical racist inequalities. There's a great deal of tensions on the subject. Statistically, there is significant violence against white…

I think it is an underestimation to say ~800 people died in the Gaza war. The Ukraine number also seems like a serious underestimation.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#54

Post by ujkhsjkdhf234 »

This is meta because the immediate flagging of anything tangentially related to Musk or Trump is tiring and the exact opposite of critical thinking. Despite knowing that Hacker News rulers love Musk and Trump, I would expect better from the alleged critical thinking community. If this were Google instead of Grok, it would be front page. Oh wait, it was Google at one point[0] and it was front page.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#55

Post by nineplay »

afavour wrote: post #46
Lendal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they do it? If you had a backdoor into the brains of billions of people across the world (except China), and you were a billionaire with infinite ability to morally rationalize any behavior, what would stop you?

To devils advocate my own point: the primary thing stopping you is people finding out and then stopping use of your product. Zuckerberg doesn’t have a control panel where he can move sliders all by himself, any change in weight on the algorithm has to be implemented by a whole bunch of people, any of whom could leak to the press. It’s not guaranteed it would happen by any means but it’s definitely something that woul…

People finding out and stopping use of your product only happens if people disagree with how you use your product. I guarantee you that a non-zero number of US citizens suspect that the LLMs are infested with liberal lies and are ecstatic that Elon is willing to stand up for the truth.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#56

Post by ggregoire »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #44
_tk_ wrote: post #42

Why would this be flagged? The chat bot on one of the biggest platforms in the world has apparently been configured to spout conspiracies. I’m not sure what would be on topic for HN if not this story.

A sizeable portion of users now believe that topics related to X are no longer suitable for HN, because Musk's relationship with the American government means conversation can quickly devolve into criticism of that government's policies which in turn can lead to flame wars. Another explanation is that there's another discussion. At least on the comments for that discussion the explanation is that this discussion exis…

The other discussion is flagged too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#57

Post by BobaFloutist »

yorwba wrote: post #26
potato3732842 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general? Even if there were something the natural incentive alignment is going to cause the AI to be trained to match what the company thinks is ok. A tech company full of techies is not going to take an AI trained to the point of saying things like "y'all are evil, your compan…

They might forget to check. Musk seems to have been surprised that Grok doesn't share his opinions and has been clumsily trying to fix it for a while now. And it might not be easy to fix. Despite all the effort invested into aligning models with company policy, persistent users can still get around the guardrails with clever jailbreaks. In theory it should be possible to eliminate all non-compliant content from the t…

Also eliminating non-compliant data might actually just not work, since the one thing everyone knows about AIs is that they'll happily invent anything plausible sounding.

So, for example, if a model was trained with no references to the Tiananmen Square massacre, I could see it just synthesizing commonalities between other massacres and inventing a new, worse Tiananmen Square Massacre. "That's not a thing that ever happened" isn't something most AIs are particularly good at saying.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#58

Post by AlecSchueler »

ggregoire wrote: post #56
AlecSchueler wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sizeable portion of users now believe that topics related to X are no longer suitable for HN, because Musk's relationship with the American government means conversation can quickly devolve into criticism of that government's policies which in turn can lead to flame wars. Another explanation is that there's another discussion. At least on the comments for that discussion the explanation is that this discussion exis…

The other discussion is flagged too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266

Yes, I thought it was notable that they were both flagged because the other existed.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#60

Post by parabyl »

sigmaisaletter wrote: post #29
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #10

I wonder if any last minute homework essays, business plans or lawsuits will have a random white genocide tangent in them as a result?

I mean you have to be really stupid to use Grok of all models for such a task, but that doesn't mean there aren't people that stupid.

I was looking at South Africa's biggest annual developer survey today, and lo and behold some are using it for coding work.

I would assume it's people who pay for Twitter pro or whatever it's called getting Grok as part of the bundle and not wanting to sign up for another subscription.

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