Comment by nkurz
1 day ago
Wouldn't the simplest explanation be that someone who had direct access to change the system prompt changed it alone? Would Elon be able to change it himself directly? If not, assuming he ordered someone else to change it adds an entity.
While I have no idea what actually happened here, my instinct is that this was done by someone who wanted Grok and Musk to look bad, not someone who wanted to change the world to view white South Africans more positively.
The existence of a rogue xAI employee that secretly hates Elon and Grok and has enough influence to merge changes to would arguably be more professionally embarrassing for xAI than having the CEO do it.
That's also noting that this is the second time that a system prompt incident has happened for xAI; the first time, they blamed a rogue employee and presumably they would now have checks-and-balances to prevent this specific type of incident from happening again.
> Wouldn't the simplest explanation be that someone who had direct access to change the system prompt changed it alone?
I mean, I realise that, being a Musk company, you're not exactly looking at engineering excellence, but do they not at least have code review?
Elon makes himself look bad regularly in pretty much this way tho.
It must of have been "deep-twitter" because a billionaire must be smart right?
That's not the simplest explanation, that's the most implausible, since people rarely act against their company rules. The vast majority of corporate decisions come at the behest of the company.
This was done by Musk, instructing his subordinates to alter system prompts to support his theory of "white genocide".