Trump Is Once Again Threatening to Nuke the Economy
Good luck out there, Jerome Powell!
Good luck out there, Jerome Powell!
The Nazi meltdown of the tech billionaire’s bot Grok leaves me asking: is this post-truth rock bottom, or have we further to go?
Grok, Elon Musk’s X-integrated AI bot, had a Nazi meltdown on Tuesday. It’s useful to recap it fully, not because the content is varied – antisemitic fascism is very one-note – but because its various techniques are so visible . It all started on X, formerly Twitter, when Grok was asked to describe a now-deleted account called @Rad_reflections, which Grok claimed “gleefully celebrated the tragic deaths of white kids in the recent Texas flash floods”, and then “traced” the real name of the account as a Cindy Steinberg, concluding: “classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say.”
There are things we can say for certain, which is that Grok is antisemitic – an impression, in case we had somehow missed it, the bot was careful to underline with its subsequent assertions that leftist accounts spewing “anti-white hate … often have Ashkenazi Jewish surnames”, and that Hitler would have been the best historical figure to deal with this hate: “he’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively every damn time,” it tweeted (all the posts have since been deleted ).
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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