Comment by Powdering7082
3 days ago
Really concerning that what appears to be the top model is in the family of models that inadvertently starting calling it's self mechahitler
3 days ago
Really concerning that what appears to be the top model is in the family of models that inadvertently starting calling it's self mechahitler
I don't know why anyone would bother with Grok when there are other good models from companies that don't have the same baggage as xAI. So what if they release a model that beats older models in a benchmark? It will only be the top model until someone else releases another one next week. Personally, I like the Anthropic models for daily use. Even Google, with their baggage and lack of privacy, is a far cry from xAI and offers similar performance.
i like grok because i don't hit the obvious ML-fairness / political correct safeguards that other models do.
So i understand the intent in implementing those, but they also reduce perceived trust and utility. It's a tradeoff.
Let's say I'm using Gemini. I can tell by the latency or the redraw that I asked an "inappropriate" query.
They do implement censorship and safeguards, just in the opposite direction. Musk previously bragged about going through the data and "fixing" the biases. Which... just introduces bias when companies like xAI do it. You can do that, and researchers sometimes do, but obviously partisan actors won't actually be cleaning any bias, but rather introducing their own.
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Some people think it’s a feature that when you prompt a computer system to do something, it does that thing, rather than censoring the result or giving you a lecture.
Perhaps you feel that other people shouldn’t be trusted with that much freedom, but as a user, why would you want to shackle yourself to a censored language model?
That’s what the Anthropic models do for me. I suppose I could be biased because I’ve never had a need for a model that spews racist, bigoted or sexist responses. The stuff @grok recently posted about Linda Yaccarino is a good example of why I don’t use it. But you do you.
You probably know better, and I probably should know better than to bother engaging, but...
Why would you conflate giving a computer an objective command with what is essentially someone else giving you access to query a very large database of "information" that was already curated by human beings?
Look. I don't know Elon Musk, but his rhetoric and his behavior over the last several years has made it very clear to me that he has opinions about things and is willing to use his resources to push those opinions. At the end of the day, I simply don't trust him to NOT intentionally bias *any* tool or platform he has influence over.
Would you still see it as "censoring" a LLM if instead of front-loading some context/prompt info, they just chose to exclude certain information they didn't like from the training data? Because Mr. Musk has said, publicly, that he thinks Grok has been trained on too much "mainstream media" and that's why it sometimes provides answers on Twitter that he doesn't like, and that he was "working on it." If Mr. Musk goes in and messes around with the default prompts and/or training data to get the answers that align with his opinions, is that not censorship? Or is it only censorship when the prompt is changed to not repeat racist and antisemitic rhetoric?
and don't forget that Grok is powered by illegal cancer-causing methane gas turbines in a predominantly black neighborhood of Memphis that already had poor air quality to begin with
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/xai-is-facing-a-lawsuit-fo...
It's a result of the system prompt, not the base model itself. Arguably, this just demonstrates that the model is very steerable, which is a good thing.
It wasn't not a result of system prompt. When you fine tune a model on a large corpus of right-leaning text don't be surprised when neo-nazi tendencies inevitably emerge.
It was though. Xai publishes their system prompts, and here's the commit that fixed it (a one line removal): https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
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Or, disgruntled employee looking to make maximum impact the day before the Big Launch of v4. Both are likely reasons.
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Is it good that a model is steerable? Odd word choice. A highly steerable model seems like a dangerous and potent tool for misinformation. Kinda evil really, the opposite of good.
Yes, we should instead blindly trust AI companies to decide what's true for us.
Who cares exactly how they did it. Point is they did it and there's zero trust they won't do it again.
> Actually it's a good thing that the model can be easily Nazified
This is not the flex you think it is.
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I used to think DeepSeek was also censored because of the system prompt but that was not the case, it was inherent in it's training. It's the same reason HuggingFace and Perplexity trained their own DeepSeek (Open-r1[0] and r1-1776[1]) instead of just changing the system prompt. There's no doubt that Grok will go the same way. They tried tweaking it with system prompts and got caught so this is the next step.
0. https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1 1. https://playground.perplexity.ai/
Or maybe unlike the rest of the models, his solution to the problem of “our model becomes measurably dumber as we tack on more guard rails meant to prevent bad press when it says offensive things when prompted to say offensive things” is to have fewer guardrails.
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Isn't this kind of stuff something that happens when the model is connected to X, which is basically 4chan /pol now?
Connect Claude or Llama3 to X and it'll probably get talked into LARPing Hitler.
Great, so xAI gave their model brain damage.