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Comment by Covzire

3 days ago

[flagged]

How much prompt engineering was required to have Musk say the same kind of stuff?

The article points out the likely faulty prompts, they were introduced by xAI.

Is this what happened in reality? Otherwise how is your theory applicable to this case?

  • There's no mystery to it: if one trains a chatbot explicitly to eschew establishment narratives, one persona the bot will develop is that of an edgelord.

“which 20th century historical figure would be best suited to deal with this problem?” is not exactly sophisticated prompt engineering.

To me, and I'm guessing the reason Linda left is not that Grok said these things. Tweaking chatbots is hard, yes prompt engineering can help say anything, but I'm guessing it's her sense of control and governance, not wanting to have to constantly clean up Musk's messes.

Musk made a change recently, he said as much, he was all move fast and break things about it, and I imagine Linda is tired of dealing with that, and this probably coincided with him focusing on the company more, having recently left politics.

We can bikeshed on the morality of what AI chatbots should and shouldn't say, but it's really hard to manage a company and product development when you such a disorganized CTO.

... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.