this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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869
Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up. (mashable.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
93 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

"Grok" sounds like a name of a really stupid ork from a D&D capaign.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] vaultdweller013 17 points 7 months ago

Pretty sure its something from a Heilein book namely stranger from a strange world.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Gork is from Stranger in a Strange Land.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Sounds a lot like Cultural appropriation, especially since it is used to market goods and services

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

'UMIE SO ZOGGIN' SMART, 'SPLAIN WOT IDJIT BOOK MORK'Z FROM, THEN

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Grok smash!