Subject: Racism and anti-Semitism unleashed
Trump has never really tried to hide his racism. He's more coy about his anti-Semitism.
But Grok let's it all hang out.
“Grok”
If we have to know what Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot is doing, so do you.
Uh, well, so, where to begin? There is this thing in business called artificial intelligence, or A.I., a catch-all term that is largely used right now to refer to a specific kind of artificial intelligence program, the large language model, which can be “trained” on previously written material such that it will respond to user questions and statements in the way a real human might. Elon Musk has deployed an LLM, brand name “Grok,” on his X/Twitter service, and instructed his engineers to let it run wild with "politically incorrect" answers. And on Monday, shortly after an update to Grok went live, the bot began praising Hitler, flagging users with historically Jewish surnames, and endorsing a second Holocaust. (X’s site describes Grok, by the way, as an “AI assistant with a twist of humor.” Comedy is in the eye of the beholder, we guess!)
Why is this political news? Well, because Elon Musk was the largest donor of the 2024 election cycle, and though he has since fallen out with the president and now wants to launch a rival third party, he lasted long enough around the White House to help stuff the administration with people who probably agree with everything the NaziBot said. Vice President J.D. Vance, for his part, gave a speech this week in which he attacked the Anti-Defamation League, the watchdog group founded amid the surge of antisemitic rhetoric and violence that set the stage for Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, for identifying domestic white-power extremists as threats to the United States. These far-right individuals, Vance said, “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” because their ancestors fought in the Civil War—earning their right to the soil by spilling blood, if you will. Great!!! Slate