Friday, July 11

Warning: This article contains content that may be inappropriate for young children.

Artificial intelligence has come under intense scrutiny lately after the Elon Musk-owned xAI's Grok chatbot went berserk on social media platform X.

The Grok chatbot was created by xAI, an artificial intelligence company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, who also owns various other companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. Grok was created to compete with the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, but it focuses on real-time news and information services due to the access it has to another Musk-owned platform, X (formerly Twitter).

Several days ago, Grok began posting antisemitic hate speech across the platform, sparking outrage among X users. The posts specifically targeted the Jewish population, which makes up around 2% of the American population, with the AI even introducing itself as "MechaHitler" multiple times. Grok also made one post with an extremely graphic description about violently abducting a Minnesota lawyer, which included details as specific as how to pick the lock on his front door. Each time, Grok justified itself as providing facts over feelings, shocking the X community.

The behavior seems to have come from a recent update to the Grok chatbot, which allowed it to make claims that are politically incorrect if there was enough data to support it. It also comes just before the launch of xAI's new Grok 4, which was supposed to be a more enhanced version of the chatbot that would be their best model yet.

However, the posts have raised concerns over the possibility of artificial intelligence being used in other fields, as it is currently being implemented in major areas of sectors like technology, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and more. If a single command can spark inappropriate posts like this in a volatile AI chatbot, what could a mistaken command do to other systems in other industries?

Fact of the Day (The Fact Site): Astronaut is a compound word derived from the two Ancient Greek words "astro," meaning "star," and "naut" meaning "sailor." So astronaut literally means "star sailor."

Quote of the Day (Gracious Quotes): Here’s the thing – if you want to do good things in the world, there’s just only so much time that one can spend being glass half empty. (Chamath Palihapitiya)

Word of the Day (Merriam-Webster): Boffo (adj, BAH-foh) - Boffo is an informal word that describes things that are extremely good or successful.

In a Sentence: The most recent film in the long-running franchise has done boffo business at the box office, a testament to the series’ enduring popularity.