DAVID MARCUS: Musk’s Nazi AI glitch a flaming canary in our national coal mine
On July 4th, eccentric billionaire and owner of X Elon Musk took to his social media platform to make an announcement about its Artificial Intelligence bot named Grok.
"We have improved Grok significantly," Musk told the world. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions."
Talk about the understatement of the century. Just a few days later, Grok had to have features shut down after it started answering questions by going full-Nazi and espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories. All that was missing was digital goosestepping and armbands.
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Responding to one user asking about Jews, Grok said that Adolf Hitler would "spot the pattern" and "handle it decisively, every damn time." For good measure, it referred to itself as MechaHitler.
If you are somewhat stunned by even reading those words, believe me, I am stunned to write them.
xAI has come up with a few weak excuses about how this was actually the fault of its users, who Musk had recently asked to teach Grok politically incorrect truths. The company claims to have "patched" the problem, whatever that means.
But come on, let’s be honest, this is the big-tech equivalent of George Constanza lying on the floor with his pants down while Jerry Seinfeld says, "And you want to be my latex salesman?"
Big tech bro Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia, took to X to back Musk up, writing "It’s embarrassing when Starship blows up, but it's better than designing in CAD forever," a kind of Pobody’s Nerfect defense.
Maguire has unwittingly hit on the big problem here. While the blown-up spaceships are unmanned, X and Grok are manned by millions of users who stand to be harmed when what purports to be the greatest intelligence on Earth starts spewing rank bigotry while the kinks get worked out.
Presumably, in the near future, Musk and the team at xAI want to be the industry standard, to play a major role managing our government, law enforcement, hospitals, and even Defense Department. How can we even consider that now?
If two or three lines of code instantly turned Grok, one of the world’s leading AI engines, into Colonel Klink from "Hogan’s Heroes," then it can’t be allowed anywhere near our essential industries or services.
All we hear, day and night, is that AI is inevitable, and you can’t stop the future. But if you look closely, the people saying that tend to be the same people who stand to make billions if we surrender our mental faculties to machines.
And while xAI rivals such as ChatGPT haven’t turned into literal fascists yet, they have consistently required tweaks to weed out bias or false information, a process that is ever ongoing.
On Wednesday night, xAI introduced Grok 4, its latest and supposedly greatest iteration to date. During the launch, Musk admitted that AI’s impact on the world might be good, or it might be bad. Then he said something truly startling: "I’ve somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that even if it wasn’t going to be good, I’d at least like to be alive to see it happen."
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It is difficult to explain how deeply irresponsible this sentiment is, especially when held by the man who owns a leading AI. He's willing to go down with the ship, but are the rest of us?
Technology feels overwhelming, giving us that same powerless feeling that makes us shrug when kids have unfettered access to hardcore porn online. But I assure you, we are not powerless.
Grok’s schizophrenic turn as a Nazi is a wake-up call. AI is not coming to save or to destroy us, no matter what the tech bros tell you. Artificial Intelligence is a power to be resisted by all who wish to cling tight to their humanity. What better evidence of this could we have than AI’s degenerate embrace of the pure inhumanity of Nazism?
You and I could never say the horrible things that rolled so easily off of Grok’s virtual tongue. That's because we know right from wrong, which is something Grok can never know. All it can know is what Musk and his engineers tell it to know.
Let Nazi Grok be a lesson to us all that as human beings we must always keep machines in their place, controlled by us, not controlling us, and always ready to be unplugged.