> We need to make sure that the AI is a good AI. And the thing that i think is most important for AI safety, at least my biological neural net tells me the most important thing for AI is to be maximally truth-seeking. so this is very fundamental. You can think of AI as this super-genius child that ultimately will outsmart you but you can instill the right values and encourage it to be sort of truthful, honorable, good things. The values you want to instill in a child that ultimately grow up to be incredibly powerful.

These are the words of a billionaire who has been supporting authoritarian and ethno-nationalist movements across the world, including playing a key role in the authoritarian takeover of the US government. He wants to instill “truth-seeking” as a “value” in Grok in anticipation of its future power.

But the authoritarian ethno-nationalist version of “truth” is not one based on science and objectivity. It’s the misanthropic “truth” widespread among ethnic-nationalist and authoritarian ideologies - “truth” that appeals to billionaires and disenfranchised members of the working class alike because it provides scapegoats without challenging the structural origins of that very disenfranchisement. A real commitment to truth would mean seeing past the exploitive power structure that Elon and billionaires like him inhabit.