Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up.
mashable.com
A shocking story was promoted on the "front page" or main feed of Elon Musk's X on Thursday:
"Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles," read the headline.
This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran's embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.
But, there was one major problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.
Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X's own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X's trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.
People who deploy AI should be held responsible for the slander and defamation the AI causes.
Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel.
Slander is spoken. In print, it’s libel.
Get me pictures of Spiderman!
Parker, why does Spider-Man have seven fingers in this photo?!
Why I imagine Xitter lawyers arguing that was it was neither spoken nor "printed", they can't be charged?
Well if you read OpenAI's terms of service, there's an indemnification clause in there.
Basically if you get ChatGPT to say something defaming/libellous and then post it, you would foot the legal bill for any lawsuits that may arise from your screenshot of what their LLM produced.
To everyone that goes to "X" to get the "real", unfiltered news, I hope you can see that it's not that site anymore.
Yet, annoyingly, much of the press still uses it to disseminate news.
I understand journalism is in a rough spot these days and many are there against their will but something needs to change abruptly. This slow exodus is too slow for democracy to survive '24.
They could use Nostr. It's a bit similar to going to a square and yelling. The downside is that you are not heard from every corner of it, but I just remembered of this existing and thought that actually the idea is very nice.
I'd argue it never was anything outside of pulling net celebs names from hats and claiming they were rapists and racists without evidence, and then having them get chased off the internet, destroying their careers in the process and in some cases causing suicides... Unless they actually did it, because then they were rich and could just buy good publicity or start an Alt-Right circle jerk where they can claim "Wokeness" did it.
it was the "yell at celebrities" website. The whole "buy a blue check" thing destroyed it.
It was never that site the FBI was literally using it for narrative control before Elon bought it
Not saying I like it now but Shit was pretty sketchy then too
"Grok" sounds like a name of a really stupid ork from a D&D capaign.
In case you're not familiar, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok.
It's somewhat common slang in hacker culture, which of course Elon is shitting all over as usual. It's especially ironic since the meaning of the word roughly means "deep or profound understanding", which their AI has anything but.
Pretty sure its something from a Heilein book namely stranger from a strange world.
Gork is from Stranger in a Strange Land.
Yup. Got also added to the Jargon File, which was an influential collection of hacker slang.
If there's one thing that Elon is really good at, it's taking obscure beloved nerd tidbits and then pigeon-shitting all over them.
Sounds a lot like Cultural appropriation, especially since it is used to market goods and services
'UMIE SO ZOGGIN' SMART, 'SPLAIN WOT IDJIT BOOK MORK'Z FROM, THEN
Grok smash!
Oh, what a surprise. Another AI spat out some more bullshit. I can't wait until companies finally give up on trying to do everything with AI.
I don't think that will ever happen.
They're acceptable of AI driving car accidents that causes harm happen. It's all part of the learning / debugging process to them.
The issue is that the process won't ever stop. It won't ever be debugged sufficiently
EDIT: Due to the way it works. A bit like static error in control theory, you know that for different applications it may or may not be acceptable. The "I" in PID-regulators and all that. IIRC
Oh great, I'm getting horrible flashbacks now to my controls class.
Another way to look at it is if there's sufficient lag time between your controlled variable and your observed variable, you will never catch up to your target. You'll always be chasing your tail with basic feedback control.
It will, someday. Probably years and years down the road (pardon the pun), but it will.
By the way, you reply to me seems very AI-ish. Are you a bot?
No, but English is not my first language
Fair enough. Apologies.
I guess the argument is that this is what "innovation and disruption" looks like. When they finally iron out so that chatbots won't invent fake headlines, they will pile on a new technology that endangers us in a new way. This is the acceptable margin of error to them.
AI isn't inherently bad. Once AI cars cause less accidents than human drivers (even if they still cause some accidents) it will be moral to use them on roads.
No, cars need to end. Move to trains.
Beware, terminally incompetent interns everywhere. Doing something incredibly damaging to your company over social media on your first day is officially a job that’s been taken by AI.
Something to do with Twitter and Elon was disinformation? I'm keeling over in shock.
Hope his ass goes to court over this.
I hope he has an aneurysm using a device to enlarge his penis or something.
I hope his penis is enlarged by the device that gives him an aneurism so that he has a closed casket and the mortician does a poor job on his gross poorly modified body.
I don't really understand this headline
The bot made it? So why was it promoted as trending?
It’s pretty, trending is based on . . . What’s trending by users.
Or as the article explains for those who can’t comprehend what trending means.
Amusingly Grok also spat a headline about how police were being deployed to shoot the earthquake after being exposed to a sarcastic tweet. https://i.imgur.com/qltkEsU.jpeg
It does say it’s likely hyperbole, so they probably just tazed and arrested the earthquake.
Also I’m impressed by the 50,000 to 1,000,000 range for officers deployed. It leaves little room for error.
I wonder if the wide margin is the AI trying to formulate logic and numbers in the story but it realizes it doesn’t know how many officers would be needed to shoot the earthquake since it would logically depends on the magnitude of the earthquake which the AI doesn’t know so it figures well alright tectonic plates are rather resistant to firearms discharge and other potential law enforcement tactics so it starts high at 50,000 but decides 1,000,000 is a reasonable cap as there just can’t be more than that many officers present in the state or country
Wow. What a world we live in.
Grok, worlds smartest orc
Same similiar thing happened with major newspapers about 100 / 150 years ago ... governments realized that if any one group or company had control over all the information without regulation, businesses will quickly figure out ways to monetize information for the benefit of those with all the money and power. They then had to figure out how to start regulating newspapers and news media in order to maintain some sort of control and sanity to the entire system.
But like the newspapers of old .... no one will do anything about all this until it causes a major crisis or causes a terrible event ... or events.
In the meantime ... big corporations controlling 99% of all media and news information will stay unregulated or regulated as little as possible until terrible things happen and society breaks down.
By the way, yeah, the LLMs of that time looked like some poor guy writing for pennies articles about astrology or how Redskins are cool but should be exterminated, or inventing fake animals and plants every time.
I've sort of mixed L. F. Baum's biography with Marek from "Good soldier Shveyk", but many consider Marek to be a portrait of author himself.
#smart
Skynet has begun
Was this some glitch in the matrix, then? (For reference: attack happened on 2024-04-14)
I'm wondering the same thing. Is this coincidence?
Not to defend elon here but so what? Is it his job?
As CEO he is ultimately responsible for his platform. So yes, in the end it's his responsibility. It's why he gets paid the big bucks.
Nah, it's a bit like government. Its only his responsability if it is no one elses responsability. Like, they can have the most corrupt gabinets, most presidents do not resign/abdicate, whatever the word is.
No it's not.
Ok, you just downvote and say no, but no explanation given. In my gov several cases of corruption arised during the last couple of years, and way more in the past. They affect high ranking ministers, and yet the oresident does not resign. Same with companies, they get paid the most, do the least, claim it is vecause they have "lots of responsabilities" but still never pay the price
Corporations are completely authoritarian, while most governments are not, or at least not completely. If there really is a "rogue engineer", Musk can very easily fire them. Even if there was, it's his responsibility to organize a company in such a way that this cannot happen, with people having oversight over other people.
He is very clearly failing to do any of that.
You didn't explain, so why should I? I did see you made things up.
I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn't nearly ready for production. Often it's "do or get fired".
So... an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of "free speech" -- that's very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I'd say.