Wish I were better read on information ecosystems, because this seems important.

Unsurprising, I guess, but still newsworthy.

Holy crap, these numbers. This passage really stood out:

“This is industrial-scale abuse of women and girls,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which conducts research on online hate and disinformation. “There have been nudifying tools, but they have never had the distribution, ease of use or the integration into a large platform that Elon Musk did with Grok.”

Good overview of an enraging story.

This is such a perfectly dumb oversight.

This is a very cathartic read.

Pair this with Emanuel Maiberg’s article I linked to earlier, and there’s a lot to think about.

I sometimes wonder if base Grok is less wild than integrated-with-Twitter Grok, but this is at least one way in which that’s not true.

Excellent writing on what’s going on over at Twitter.

Wait what

Surely Elon “assassination coordinates” Musk is outraged that his own AI would do this. Right?

Very helpful context—especially as I consider writing a paper on Grokipedia.

This provides some helpful context, including confirming my suspicion that Twitter!Grok works differently than Base!Grok when it comes to these weird episodes.

Sometimes, AI news gets so depressing that it loops back around to hilarious.

What. The. Hell.

Easy to dunk on Grokipedia, but this article gets at some ideas that I think are particularly important. If I had more time for blogging this semester, I’d write something up on Ellul’s image vs. word dichotomy and how it aligns with Koebler’s thoughts here.

Depressing read but very well put.

Good overview of recent Grok nonsense.

Perhaps the best demonstration yet of why we need to talk about epistemology when we talk about generative AI. Gift link. It turns out that it takes an awful lot of intervention to get Grok to be “maximally truth-seeking” and “neutral.”

There are many worse things happening in our country right now, but also: this is petty and embarrassing.

Unsurprising but disappointing.

Musk leans into the bro in tech bro.

Look, I really will stop posting about Grok and epistemology, but the news stories keep coming.

Okay, really don’t want to spend any more time writing about Grok, but let’s talk about this passage:

“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions,” Musk claimed during the livestream. We’ve previously covered nebulous claims about “PhD-level” AI, finding them to be generally specious marketing talk.

To return to my thoughts on AI and epistemology, I don’t think having a PhD is (or should be) a benchmark for content knowledge. Rather, I think it demonstrates (or should demonstrate) a commitment to the process of knowledge production, and LLMs cannot truly compete with humans there.

Yesterday, I wrote my thoughts on how Grok’s “Nazi meltdown” helps illustrate some of my concerns about AI and epistemology.

This coverage of Grok’s latest demo only reinforces that—Musk’s tinkering with the LLM to get the results he wants is at odds with his states naïve epistemology that an LLM can be “maximally truth-seeking,” as though there is a self-evident truth that an LLM can deliver in a straightforward way (that is, without all that mucking about behind the scenes).

Yesterday, I blogged (en français) on Jacques Ellul’s emphasis on the need for a technology-responsive ethic that emphasizes (among other values) tension and conflict. Ellul explores this ethic—one of non-power—in a few different writings that feel like different drafts of the same thing, and so I’ve seen that emphasis come up a few times as I’ve tried reading his work. Every time, it surprises me a little bit. Why, in articulating an ethical framework, would you emphasize tension and conflict?