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A bit like AI, Elon Musk seems custom-built to undermine everything good and true in the world | Zoe Williams
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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