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Comment by djyaz1200 | Hacker News Reader

Grok has an advantage in its access to Twitter data.

I imagine soon you'll be able to ask it what the world is talking about today and get some interesting responses.

That's a great advantage in theory. In practice, I've never found X integration to work great in practice. For eg., when I asked it to source X posts on Nix related complaints it was only able to find a single niche user,

https://x.com/i/grok/share/Qw5NDq5BINGSBqNg9wrqBjf1y

This is a feature they've already built into Twitter. I tried to extend it to work outside Twitter but still based on Twitter trends, basically allowing people to glance at Grok's summaries of global conversations. Unfortunately the new API pricing for Twitter is prohibitly expensive

This was probably more useful back when everyone was on twitter.

To be fair, it was never everyone. Twitter was always small compared to Facebook and other networks.

It punches above its weight because it's where the cultural elite communicate.

No one I pay attention to posts on twitter any more.

Today I saw a twitter interaction between, of all people, Ross Douthat and Scott Alexander. Two very bright and interesting thinkers with wildly divergent points of view, discussing ideas with courtesy

unfortunately they are now just hanging out at the nazi bar

Oh no no no, he drinks in the Human Biodiversity and Neoreactionary bars. Totally different thing entirely, even if both are full of Nazis.

Serious question, where do they post to?

As far as I can tell, Mastodon was briefly hyped on HN but nobody actually uses it. Bluesky seems to have a few people within a fairly narrow political range. Truth social is just for Trump. Reddit is pseudoanonymous as is HN. Instagram is for sharing photos not ideas or links. TikTok is a Skinner box.

I ask this as someone who genuinely doesn't know how to use the internet anymore. Reddit used to be useful but is now a cesspool. LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers. The twitter-clones all feel a bit like using a paper straw to fight climate change.

I know there are semi-private slack groups and discord channels out there, but I don't know how to find or join them and it seems like a hassle to follow.

Basically, for me, no one I pay attention to posts anywhere any more.

Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.

BlueSky is the new up-and-comer. I am enjoying it, but I unfollow anyone that posts ragebait or political content (besides memes, some of those are pretty funny).

> LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers.

Thank you for this horrifically accurate and insightful characterization.

All social media is a Skinner box

Jack even said so when Twitter originally took off. He was excited to see how 140 chars forced people to shape their thoughts.

Everyone is tired of it. That’s why the formerly popular social media sucks now.

The entire economy in the US is built around behavioral economics experimentation, A/B test, measuring retail behavior and putting options in front of retail shoppers.

You sound like an another exhausting American. Rather than find community through self guided journey you just want it handed to you, like a religion.

They post on Bluesky.

Nobody I know in person has ever posted to Twitter either now or back when it was cool.

Yes but it was pretty diverse in that sense that most people were somewhat represented. That representation is rather skewed right nowadays

CommunicateD ?

Everyone significant still is

How funny!

A "meager" 600+ million users today

Of which approximately half are inactive. So about 10% of Facebook.

It's not just about absolute numbers but about the diversity of users.

I built this with a pal years ago. Elasticsearch + realtime scraping of large swathes of Twitter, Discord, other chat networks and aggregators, comment systems, news articles, etc. LLM-augmented analysis engine and ontological recovery.

It was pretty cool, but we lacked funding to continue and then everyone closed the hatches after ChatGPT released.

You must have a pretty cool unique dataset though

> what the world is talking about today

Not world. Twitter and whoever's left on it.

I don't know when it was enabled, but on Desktop if you click on the Grok icon on a Tweet, it will tell you all the context. It's been quiet useful to keep up with obscure posts that pop up.

This is one of my quickest adopted AI features. Twitter is one of the most opaque social media because of the character limit and the way it mixes different in-crowds in verbal combat, so explaining the context really makes it more fun to use. They just need to improve the feature with even more training. I feel there is usually one main obscure item that needs explaining and it often explains everything else.

What shocks me more is when the tweet is only a video or image, and it still pulls up as much as it knows.

> I imagine soon you'll be able to ask it what the world is talking about today and get some interesting responses.

You'll get exactly what Elon wants it to say.

I don't think so, at least not with the previous version. When asked if it would vote for Trump or Harris, it said Harris

https://x.com/i/grok/share/dideG2pNJEXZmjEtXoISDD8CT

This is the second launch. Because during the first grok wasn't politically aligned enough with elon.

Is this true or are you just speculating based on nothing

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks...

That says he is trying to make it neutral, not aligned with him.

Yes. And Elon is also a free speech absolutist. It’s amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability when someone like Elon promises them something despite decades of lies.

Look, I don't like Elon. I don't trust him at all, but your proof that he is going to do X is that he said he is going to do Y. I was expecting some actual evidence, not mind reading.

It is also amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability coming to the conclusion Elon will never tell the truth.

He is living rent free in the minds of the people who love him and the people who have this visceral hatred of him. It is so sad that so many people are obsessed with him.

his actions are ripping apart the Federal Government and will have huge, negative impact, on millions of people

That is not proof that he is going to turn Grok into an ideological tool?

This is my problem with every conversation of Musk. Nobody can address the actual point because they either love him or hate him. Is there ANY proof of the claim? No? Then what is the purpose of your post other than to publicly express hatred?

Elon is tearing apart the federal government

I don't think he's living "rent-free" in those people's minds. his actions directly negatively affect them and their families.

Thanks for proving my point that people have lost all ability to hold a coherent conversation when it comes to Musk. I am asking for proof that Grok is being turned into an ideological tool and you are talking about Musk destroying the government. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Musk destroying the government isn't even the reason people can't stop thinking of him or they wouldn't have been non-stop talking about him during the Twitter purchase.

It's actually the opposite. I asked about some details in the current ukraine situation, and it stated mostly facts with a few words critical of Trump. This is about neutral. But it showed pretty strong Keynesian tendency when I asked it about some economic policy issues earlier.

I'm not sure if it's practically possible to corrupt the training data that much while still giving sensible answers. After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

It's easy enough to system prompt. Even if it's not now it can be added at any time.

I wouldn't call access to hundreds of thousands of posts of "PUSSY IN BIO" an advantage, but to each their own.

Isn't twitter mostly low quality text or full blown noise ?

Tbf, everything is mostly low quality or noise.

TBF, I've found that most people who are trying to be fair or advocating for the devil instead of stating their opinion clearly are a good chunk of the low quality noise

My point exactly

Grok - Two Roman salutes were given at the president's inauguration. Nothing else happened today.

fwiw - you can do this right now with Grok 2.

Can you elaborate? What would you ask it about what people are saying on Twitter and what kind of response would be interesting and potentially valuable?

Posts often reference people, events, technology, places, etc. Grok effortlessly provides background, counterpoints, etc. I find it amazingly useful.

> Grok has an advantage in its access to Twitter data.

Or is the advantage the other way around? That it has access to Twitter users (the ones that are not bots, that is)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y&t=1005s

I like that Grok actually comes up with a ton of links when you ask it a question, but at the same time I think any ambitious LLM platform wouldn't have too much trouble scraping Twitter/X all the same.

That’s a version of the “news” I’d care to never have summarized.

Also seems like a perfect incentive to spread (even more) harmful disinformation.

I would love that.

Problem is, it will probably not tell you the truth about it as Twitter has always had censorship one way or the other.

So it will tell you what twitter policy is allowing people to talk about and allowing grok to report.

I don't really understand this Twitter (or in general social media) censorship argument. If I call someone on the street a fckin idiot I probably get slapped or even shot in certain places, and everybody will say I called for it. And even without physical violence I can get slapped with a lawsuit and forced to pay damages. Now if I do the same on social media it's suddenly all "muh liberty of expression" if anyone reacts to it. Aren't we maybe having the wrong expectations online, that it would be somehow supporting all the shit we cannot do in real life? Okay I realize this ship already sailed and online people do online all shit not allowed offline, but I rather see the situation as a miserable failure of law enforcement, and not as a hard won right to be an ass to your fellow citizens.

What country do you live in? In the USA, you can say “I think person X is an idiot”. That’s protected speech. No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL. If someone punches you in the face for calling them an idiot on the street, then they are likely going to get prosecuted for those actions. Yes you run the risk of getting punched in the face but you are not in any trouble with the law.

OTOH it’s a problem if you say “Person X is a rapist”. Then you might get sued for libel. You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.

Censorship online on a social media platform is not subject to any freedom of speech laws. Freedom of speech only applies to the US Government not restricting your speech. The social media platform has the authority to regulate speech however they want to on their platform.

> You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.

This is something that people seem to expect to be able to do on social media. I think maybe that's part of the point that was being made. People don't want social networks that are concerned with stopping libelous remarks from going viral. In fact, it seems like people would love a social network that consists exclusively of libelous remarks.

The weird thing is that social networks seem to actually be willing to deliver this content.

> No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL

In the USA, you can absolutely be sued for this. The plaintiff is unlikely to win, and you could probably get the case dismissed if you convince a judge that's it's clearly an opinion, but you'd still have to pay a lawyer some fees.

People can sue you for anything.

The first amendment doesn't protect you from lawsuits. It protects you from the government putting you in jail for speech.

I don't really get why people point this out. Yes, you can be sued for anything. But what are you actually suggesting? That you do nothing, ever, because you could be sued for anything? Or are we just doing the same old nitpick?

They point it out because there was an explicit claim to the contrary.

"No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL. "

A charitable interpretation of that claim would be that 'No one can successfully sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL.'

Pointing out that the statement is false in the most uninteresting literal sense is just odd. Sure, you can be sued for that in the same sense that you can be sued for eating a croissant. Glad we got to the bottom of that.

So the difference is the kind of insult?

This would be a huge improvement on some news sites which do little more than regurgitate controversial Tweets (Xeets?)

Not really. See what Claude Shannon has to say about channel capacity of what your brain can digest if Grok finds 8 million things that are happening currently that might be interesting to you.

> the world

Well, a tiny slice of the world - Elon, his supporters, bots and a couple of stray humans posting porn.

what an interesting prompt

Twitter data seems awful. Full to the brim with bots and misinformation.

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