4d ago

Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says

It certainly wasn’t because the company is owned by a far-right South African billionaire at the same moment that the Trump admin is entertaining a plan to grant refugee status to white Afrikaners. /s

My partner is a real refugee. She was jailed for advocating democracy in her home country. She would have received a lengthy prison sentence after trial had she not escaped. This crap is bullshit. Btw, did you hear about the white-genocide happening in the USA? Sorry, I must have used Grok to write this. Go Elon! Cybertrucks are cool! Twitter isn’t a racist hellscape!

The stuff at the end was sarcasm, you dolt. Shut up.

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I am pretty sure that is called disinformation. Rather than "unauthorized edit"...

they say unauthorised because they got caught
- "I didn't give you permission to get caught!"
- Not sure how they really expected any other outcome.
  
  maybe they just wanted to take their free shot. Its not like there are any real consequences for corporations nowdays

Brah, if your CEO edits the prompt, it's not unauthorized. It may be undesirable, but it really ain't unauthorised

Translation: of course they're not going to admit that Elon did it.
- Hey! He only owns the platform. Why would you think he's putting his thumb on the scale? /s

Musk isn't authorized anymore?
- Depends on the ketamine levels in his blood at any given moment. Sometimes, you edit your prompts from a k-hole, and everyone knows you can't authorize your own actions when you're fully dissociated.
  
  I don't understand how he can be such an ass. I spent plenty of time in a hole. I liken it to the river of souls... Your soul flowing through the river of the universe with all the other souls being cleansed. I Consider it a sacrament and a psychedelic at higher levels. Not a party drug.. Hard to party when you're laying down or walking with a 45 degrees slant.
  With all his Burning Man experience, you would think he would have done some deems. Then realized there's more to this life and abusing others is like abusing yourself.
- Unilaterally Authorized. Or UnAuthorized for short.
- Looks like Elon used his Alt account.

Elon looking for the unauthorized person:

The unauthorized edit is coming from inside the house.
- Unauthorized is their office nickname for Musk.
- Its incredible how things can just slip through, especially when they start at the very top

They say that they'll upload the system prompt to github but that's just deception. The Twitter algorithm is "open source on github" and hasn't been updated for over 2 years. The issues are a fun read tho https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues
There's just no way to trust that anything is running on the server unless it's audited by 3rd party.
So now all of these idiots going to believe "but its on github open source" when the code is never actually being run by anyone ever.
- We need people educated on open source, community-made hardware and software

- Don’t know the reference but I’m sure it’s awesome. :p
  
  https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo
  
  It's from the show "I think you should leave." There's a sketch where someone has crashed a weinermobile into a storefront, and bystanders are like "did anyone get hurt?" "What happened to the driver?" And then this guy shows up.

Yeah, billionaires are just going to randomly change AI around whenever they feel like it.
That AI you've been using for 5 years? Wake up one day, and it's been lobotomized into a trump asshole. Now it gives you bad information constantly.
Maybe the AI was taken over by religious assholes, now telling people that gods exist, manufacturing false evidence?
Who knows who is controlling these AI. Billionaires, tech assholes, some random evil corporation?
- Joke's on you, LLMs already give us bad information
  
  Sure, but unintentionally. I heard about a guy whose small business (which is just him) recently had someone call in, furious because ChatGPT told them that he was having a sale that she couldn't find. The customer didn't believe him when he said that the promotion didn't exist. Once someone decides to leverage that, and make a sufficiently-popular AI model start giving bad information on purpose, things will escalate.
  Even now, I think Elon could put a small company out of business if he wanted to, just by making Grok claim that its owner was a pedophile or something.
- That's a good reason to use open source models. If your provider does something you don't like, you can always switch to another one, or even selfhost it.
  
  Or better yet, use your own brain.
  
  While true, it doesn't keep you safe from sleeper agent attacks.
  These can essentially allow the creator of your model to inject (seamlessly, undetectably until the desired response is triggered) behaviors into a model that will only trigger when given a specific prompt, or when a certain condition is met. (such as a date in time having passed)
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05566
  It's obviously not as likely as a company simply tweaking their models when they feel like it, and it prevents them from changing anything on the fly after the training is complete and the model is distributed, (although I could see a model designed to pull from the internet being given a vulnerability where it queries a specific URL on the company's servers that can then be updated with any given additional payload) but I personally think we'll see vulnerabilities like this become evident over time, as I have no doubts it will become a target, especially for nation state actors, to simply slip some faulty data into training datasets or fine-tuning processes that get picked up by many models.
- I currently treat any positive interaction with an LLM as a “while the getting’s good” experience. It probably won’t be this good forever, just like Google’s search.
  
  Pretty sad that the current state would be considered "good"
- Yep, I knew this from the very beginning. Sadly the hype consumed the stupid, as it always will. And we will suffer for it, even though we knew better. Sometimes I hate humanity.

Musk made the change but since AI is still as rough as his auto driving tech it did t work like he planned
But this is the future folks. Modifying the AI to fit the narrative of the regime. He's just too stupid to do it right or he might be stupid and think these llms work better than they actually do.
- he might be stupid and think these llms work better than they actually do.
  There it is.
- Are we talking about the same guy that opted to scrap all sensors for his self-driving cars because he figures humans can drive with eyes only, they don't need more than a camera?

This is why I tell people stop using LLMs. The owner class owns them (imagine that) and will tell it to tell you what they want so they make more money. Simple as that.
- This is why the Chinese openly releasing deepseek was such a kick in the balls to the LLM tech bros.

I'm going to bring it up.
Isn't this the same asshole who posted the "Woke racist" meme as a response to Gemini generating images of Black SS officers? Of course we now know he was merely triggered by the suggestion because of his commitment to white supremacy and alignment with the SS ideals, which he could not stand to see, pun not intended, denigrated.
The Gemini ordeal was itself a result of a system prompt; a half-ass attempt to correct for white bias deeply learned by the algorithm, just a few short years after Google ousted their AI ethics researcher for bringing this type of stuff up.
Few were the outlets that did not lend credence to the "outrage" about "diversity bias" bullshit and actually covered that deep learning algorithms are indeed sexist and racist.
Now this nazi piece of shit goes ahead and does the exact same thing; he tweaks a system prompt causing the bot to bring up the self-serving and racially charged topic of apartheid racists being purportedly persecuted. He does the vary same thing he said was "uncivilizational", the same concept he brought up just before he performed the two back-to-back Sieg Heil salutes during Trump's inauguration.
He was clearly not concerned about historical accuracy, not the superficial attempt to brown-wash the horrible past of racism which translates to modern algorithms' bias. His concern was clearly the representation of people of color, and the very ideal of diversity, so he effectively went on and implemented his supremacist seething into a brutal, misanthropic policy with his interference in the election and involvement in the criminal, fascist operation also known as DOGE.
Is there anyone at this point that is still sitting on the fence about Musk's intellectual dishonesty and deeply held supremacist convictions? Quickest way to discover nazis nowadays really: (thinks that Musk is a misunderstood genius and the nazi shit is all fake).
- In a (code) perfect world, wouldn't an LLMs "personality" and biases be aligned with the median of its training set?
  In other words....stupid-in/stupid-out. As long as the (median of) input data is racist and sexist, the output data would be equally bigoted.
  That's not to say that the average person is openly bigoted, but the open bigots are pretty damn loud.
  
  That’s not to say that the average person is openly bigoted
  I do think the average person openly perpetuates racist stereotypes due to the pressure of systemic racism. Not that they intend to, and their beliefs frequently contradict their actions because they just don't notice that they are going along with it.
  Like the average person will talk about the 'bad part of town' in a way that implies the bad part is due to being where 'those people' live.

Looks like someone's taking some lessons from Zuck's methodology. "Whoops! That highly questionable and suspiciously intentional shit we did was totes an accident! Spilt milk now, I guess! Wuh-huh-heey honk-honk!"

None of the explanations matter now, too late. "White genocide" is now a thing in SA. The term is in people's heads. Mission accomplished.

Hmm, sure.

There goes Adrian Dittman again. That guy oughta be locked up.

And what about Elmo’s white genocide obsession?

i wish i knew who the rogue employee was. incredible
- I heard their initials are E.M.
  
  that's probably not true. I imagine it was someone trying to harm the guy. a hilarious prank

Haha, keep fucking with it, this is entertaining

...is entertaining a plan to grant refugee status to white Afrikaners
FYI, the Republicans have already done it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/nx-s1-5395067/first-group-afrikaner-refugees-arrive

This actually shows that they're is work being done to use LLM on social media to pretend to be ordinary users and trying to sway opinion of the population.
This is currently the biggest danger of LLM, and the bill to prevent states from regulating it is to ensure they can continue using it

Lesson learned: AI are not reliable.

Did you read what Grok was saying? Grok was saying that white genocide is questionable at best, and unfounded.
It was just saying when prompted about unrelated stuff which is what made it bizarre. It never said it was a real thing, nor endorsing the idea that it is something real.
- Why was it mentioning it at all in conversations not about it?
  And why does the fact that it did that not seem to bother you?
  
  I guess you didn’t read the article, or don’t understand how LLMs work so I’ll explain.
  An employee changed the AI’s system prompt, telling it to avoid spreading white genocide misinformation in South Africa. The system prompt is a context that tells the AI how to work with the prompts it is given and it forces it “to think” about whatever is on there. So by making that change in the system prompt every time someone prompted Grok about anything, it would think about not spreading misinformation about white genocide in South Africa, so it inserted that into pretty much everything.
  So it doesn’t bother me because it’s an LLM acting as it is supposed to when someone messes with the settings. Grok probably did not need these instructions in the first place, as it’s consistently been embarrassing Elon every time the man posts one of his shitbrained takes, and while I haven’t used that AI, I don’t think, or have yet to see proof that Elon is directing it’s training to be positive conservative ideologies or harebrained conspiracy theories. It could be for all I know, but from what I’ve seen Grok sticks to facts as they are.
  A lot of people are reading the misleadingly titled articles about this thinking that Elon made the AI spread the notion that there’s such a thing as a white genocide in South Africa when that was not at all what happened. You need to read the actual article or else you’re falling for the same shit the MAGAtards do.

That's the problem with modern AI and future technologies we are creating
We, as a human civilization, are not creating future technology for the betterment of mankind ... we are arrogantly and ignorantly manipulating all future technology for our own personal gain and preferences.

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