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Comment by Sol- | Hacker News Reader

I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies.

That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts.

I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?

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I disagree, I find that the grok replies are terrible product UX. Not only do they clog up the replies of every popular post, they're also constrained to extremely short answers with no sources. The community notes system, while also flawed in its own ways, is at least not nearly as disruptive and usually provides a link.

Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.

I like you can ask Grok to search the social graph and comments. Hacker news also has one semantic search engine (https://hackersearch.net/), reddit has none and it's a pity.

I’m really, really uninterested in reading AI content that other people have generated. If I’m on Twitter, I’m looking for what humans have to say.

I'm afraid that ship has long sailed. The humans left on Twitter are all just copy pasting AI slop now...

Grok is a bot that:

1) sometimes goes mechahitler

2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).

3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.

Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational than the average xitter poster, that says more about that platform than it does about Grok.

I guess I was mostly arguing that the integration of something like Grok into Twitter was definitely a net positive for online discussion, as anyone has a fact checker and explainer at hand now to diffuse irrational online arguments.

Also I think you overrate Musk's success in fiddling with the model. As I have written, I also don't like his attempts to tune it to his tastes, but if you see the outputs that people get from Grok, it seems mostly fine except in the specific scenarios that Musk seems to have focused their misalignment on.

Of course something like Claude being integrated into Twitter would likely be better.

He doesn't have to fiddle with the model because he gets to inject his own opinion into the context MitM style.

But I get what you're saying now, a fact checker available to query during an online discussion would be helpful. Assuming the checkerbot was actually independent/neutral and backed responses with sources. Definitely not assumptions you can make with grok.

It was also producing CSAM on demand for a few months.

It still is, you just need to pay.

> 1) sometimes goes mechahitler

That "MechaHitler" episode lasted less than a day.

> 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).

No, it was trained and instructed to be truthful, even if the truth is deemed politically incorrect.

> 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.

Certainly a nugget of truth there.

> Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me.

I do believe it's generally objective, simply due to the fact that despite how much Elon tries to push it to the right, it still dunks on right-wingers all the time when they summon Grok to back up a bullshit story, but Grok debunks it instead.

You’re right. But it appears they may have failed with 2) and 3) because I frequently see Grok spit out content that doesn’t agree with the creators’ narrative.

From what I heard it was designed to prefer truth over political correctness. I don't use Grok or Twitter though so I cannot comment on whether that aim was achieved (or even seriously attempted).

I will however note that when I asked ChatGPT for an LLM prompt for truthfulness, it added "never use warm or encouraging language."

It would appear that empathy and truth are in conflict — or at least the machine thinks so!

> Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants

Hard agree.

respectfully, I do not find Mecha Hitler to be particularly free of bias.

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