70 pointsby afavoura day ago8 comments
  • WarOnPrivacya day ago
    The gist is down the page. I believe the assertion is sound and is worthy of consideration.

        Here’s the thing: Grok didn’t say anything. Grok didn’t
        blame anyone. Grok didn’t apologize. Grok can’t do any
        of these things, because Grok is not a sentient entity
        capable of speech acts, blame assignment, or remorse.
    
        What actually happened is that a user prompted Grok to generate
        text about the incident. The chatbot then produced a word sequence
        that pattern-matched to what an apology might sound like, because
        that’s what large language models do. They predict statistically
        likely next tokens based on their training data. 
    
        When you ask an LLM to write an apology, it writes something that
        looks like an apology. That’s not the same as actually apologizing.
    • tim33311 hours ago
      I think when people say "the car says it's low on petrol" they understand the car probably didn't talk but a petrol gauge caused it to display some message. I don't know if you have to police language if people understand what's going on.

      At least with LLMs it's not too hard to figure what's going on, unlike certain politicians.

      • dfxm122 hours ago
        This in an, um, interesting, way to interpret what's happening. Twitter is generating csam and revenge porn. You're worried about "policing language" and news outlets are credulously reporting that grok is apologizing, but you are completely ignoring the sexually abused women & girls who deserve justice. Anything that takes the responsibility away from Twitter and its execs (including reporting about ai apologies or complaining about the language police) here is just helping them escape justice.
    • afavoura day ago
      Unfortunately the discussion has been flagged. As is often the case.
      • ryandrakea day ago
        This is to be expected here, unfortunately. Any article that reveals anything bad about a Musk-run company will get instantly flagged. Sometimes the mods will show up and correct it, but by then the damage is done--the article has been wiped off the front page and it's Mission Accomplished for the flaggers.
        • kccoder15 hours ago
          Hacker news could fix this if they wanted to.
          • Razengan13 hours ago
            HN doesn't want to fix shit
    • ares623a day ago
      Just like human CEOs /s
  • ninjua day ago
    The fact that we have anthropomorphized AI systems (not just Grok) is because of the way in which we interact with these system with natural language.
    • roywigginsa day ago
      It's 50-80% because they are RLHFed into talking with "I". This was far less of an issue when it was just GPT-3 in a completion UI. But people find LLMs trained to produce text that looks like it's coming from a personality to be more compelling: ChatGPT is when the tech exploded into popularity.

      LLMs that aren't chat tuned are just not as easy to anthropomorphize.

      • biophysboya day ago
        I really wish I could use custom products w/ RLHF turned off. I know that's not how it works, but the stupid marketing copy speak makes me use them less
        • digiown18 hours ago
          If you use the API directly via open webui, etc., it is not nearly as annoying. You can also system prompt it into sounding more reasonable.
    • guywithahata day ago
      That's sort of my thought too. Grok can't apologize, but it also can't do anything without being told. A hammer can't apologize, but it also doesn't know the difference between hitting a nail or a person. Perhaps we could design a hammer that does less harm to a human but if it comes at the cost of being a worse hammer I don't want it
      • WarOnPrivacya day ago
        > Grok can't apologize, but it also can't do anything without being told.

        If you mean being told by the end user, this famously hasn't been the case. Dialing back the only restriction was enough for Grok to create nsfw material (w/o any request to create that).

             [Grok] didn’t hesitate to spit out fully uncensored topless
             videos of Taylor Swift the very first time I used it
             without me even specifically asking the bot to take her clothes off.
        • a day ago
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  • r0ckaronga day ago
    Because we live in a technofeudalist hellscape where the media is owned by the people who profit from out oppression.
  • biophysboya day ago
    I am really grateful I have a basic understanding of 1) how LLMs work, & 2) zero trust in tech marketing/branding. I would be a lot more afraid of the future otherwise. Its not surprising to me at all that people believe AI models are sentient and capable of apologies.
  • minimaxira day ago
    The real reason is because LLMs are a highly nuanced and technical topic that has been constantly evolving, but any attempt to suggest that LLMs require nuance is met with accusations of AI boosterism and are subsequently ignored. So journalists tend to go with Occam's Razor.

    I have tried to offer corrections to incorrect headlines and technical information about LLMs over the past few years but have stopped because I don't have the bandwidth to deal with the "so you support the plagiarism machine" comments every time.

  • chopete3a day ago
    >>>

    strangers were replying to women’s photos and asking Grok, the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, to “remove her clothes” or “put her in a bikini.” And Grok was doing it. Publicly. In the replies. For everyone to see.

    Wow. Thats some really creepy behavior people are choosing to show off publicly.

    Grok needs some tighter gaurdrails to prevent abuse.

  • Havoca day ago
    Pretty wild that xAI decided to simply not comment on what seems like a pretty sizable fuckup
  • dfxm12a day ago
    [flagged]