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Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

So.. If the 'source' of data is 9gag, 4chan, you will get 'this' material. If you feed it Tumlr, you will get Harry Potter and rope-porn-thingies. If you feed it Hitler's speeches, you will get 'that' material. If you feed it algebra, you will get 'that' material.

Then.. Do we want 'open' or 'curated' LLMs? And how far from reality are the curated LLMs? And how far can curated LLMs take us (black Nazis? female US founding fathers?).

Pick your poison I say.. and be careful what you wish for. There is no "perfect" LLM because there is no "perfect" dataset, and Sam-Altman-types-of-humans are definitely deeply flawed. But life is flawed, so our tools are/will be flawed.

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The problem was not the source of the training data. xAI confirmed that the system prompt had been modified to make grok talk about South African white genocide.

While they didn’t say who modified it. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t Elon.

Eye roll

It's hard to believe it is Elon either, I don't think he would know how unless they made a special interface for him

He is the CEO of a company, he can personally ask someone to do it for him.

But implementation was too messy for someone with expertise to do it on CEO's request

> While they didn’t say who modified it. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t Elon.

Is it really that hard to understand how these things happen?

The boss says "remove bias" but the peons don't really know how to do that and the naive approach to unbiasing a thing is to introduce bias in the other direction. And then if you're Google and the boss thinks it has a right-wing bias you crook it and get black Nazis and if you're xAI and the boss thinks it has a left-wing bias you get white genocide.

In both cases the actual problem is when people think bias operates like an arithmetic sum, because it doesn't.

Except someone clearly wanted Grok to talk about some very specific South African phrases and events, not just “remove bias” in the general sense.

That's precisely how the arithmetic theory of bias operates. That bias doesn't actually work that way is why applying it causes such ridiculous outcomes.

The term "kill the boer" was almost certainly added to the system prompt because Grok would begin talking about specifically that song, unprompted, to millions of people no matter what they were talking about.

This is not a case of trying to remove bias. I don't for a second believe anyone from the demographic using this site acting naive about that either, just have whatever political opinion and don't pretend this is respectable.

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