Elon Musk is touting the imminent release of his ChatGPT competitor Grok, another example of how his entire persona is itself just an MBA created by absorbing both Reddit and 4chan. Groke does seem embellished in several aspects of Elon’s worst indulgences, with the humor of unfunny, reactionary internet trolls, and the prejudices informed by a man whose terrible and dangerous prejudices are completely invisible to himself.
There are many reasons to be wary of Grok, including the standard reasons to be wary of any current LLM-based AI technology, such as hallucinations and imprecision. Layer on Elon Musk’s recent track record of disastrous social sensitivity and generally harmful approach to the issues shaping the world, and we’re already looking at even more reasons to worry. But the real risk may not be easy yet, if only because we still understand little about the impact the widespread use of LLMs will have on our daily lives and on the Internet.
One key area where they already have, and are sure to have a much greater impact, is user-generated content. We’ve already seen companies deploy first-party integrations that are starting to embrace some of these uses, like Artifact with its AI-generated thumbnails for shared posts, and Meta adding chatbots to basically everything. Musk is launching Grok on the X for the first time, initially as a feature for Premium+ subscribers, and it should start rolling out this week.
Musk is clearly aiming to use Grok as a carrot to attract more subscribers to the more expensive subscription tier of Dumpster Fire Even from its not so stellar days as Twitter.
The real threat isn’t even a misinformation-laden chatbot spreading widely on a network that has been heavily criticized by its current owner for being bot-ridden; No, the real danger is what happens if Musk’s miniature AI starts hiding the rest of the speech — and what happens if wealthy megalomaniacs see it work for him.
Musk’s special ability as it currently stands is a sycophantic following willing to accept his interpretation of reality, no matter how clearly distorted or incorrect it may be. But this is nothing compared to an LLM trained essentially in the same nonsense, who is able not only to parrot but also to generate new, highly accurate “opinions” and “views” made from the clay of their maker, and then rapidly disseminate them with unrestricted access to A network that still includes tens of millions of influential users.
The one advantage that many, many people who are not currently billionaires have over those who are is the abundance of their wealth – masses are masses because of their mass. Although I’m sure there are many secret outside attempts to clone billionaires as an answer to this difficult mathematical problem, it remains somewhat intractable. However, the rise of MBA-based chatbots threatens to destabilize the very concept of public opinion, by drowning out the voices of real users with a myriad of artificial voices that are indistinguishable from real humans.
We have already seen demagogues of late-stage capitalism trying to claim a “populist” perspective that has no basis in actually being the will of the people. However, so far they have done so mostly through bald-faced swagger; Within a few iterations of an LLM-powered chatbot attack, they can have artificial, but convincing, numbers to back up their malicious interpretations of the world.