[wormlord]

The desire to be "centrist" on HN is perplexing to me.

The fact that Elon, a white south african, made his AI go crazy by adding some text about "white genocide", is factual and should be taken into consideration if you want to have an honest discussion about ethics in tech. Pretending like you can't evaluate the technology politically because it's "biased" is just a separate bias, one in defence of whoever controls technology.

[reverendsteveii]

"Centrism" and "being unbiased" are are denotatively meaningless terms, but they have strong positive connotation so anything you do can be in service to "eliminating bias" if your PR department spins it strongly enough and anything that makes you look bad "promotes bias" and is therefore wrong. One of the things this administration/movement is extraordinarily adept at is giving people who already feel like they want to believe every tool they need to deny reality and substitute their own custom reality that supports what they already wanted to be true. Being able to say "That's just fake news. Everyone is biased." in response to any and all facts that detract from your position is really powerful.

[somenameforme]

It's far more likely that an employee injected malicious code, exactly as said. Elon's become a divisive figure in a country filled with lots of crazy people, to the point of there been relatively widescale acts of criminality, just to try to spite him. Somebody trying to screw over the company seems far more believable than Elon deciding to effectively break Grok to rant about things in wholly inappropriate contexts.

[elliotto]

Didn't this guy hit the salute in front of the entire world? To me it seems very likely that he would inject a racist prompt. Far more likely than a random hacker doing so to discredit him.

[pavlov]

If that were the case, Musk absolutely would have shared the details of who this person was, why they hate freedom so much, how they got radicalized by the woke mind virus, etc.

Instead we got a vague euphemism.

[airstrike]

First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess. How do you know other models are just as heavily skewed but just less open about them? The real alignment issue today is not about AGI, but about hidden biases.

Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.

In reality, politics is more of a field than a single dimension, and people may very well have their reasons to reject both "the left" and "the right" without being morally bankrupt.

Consider that you too are subject to your biases and remember that moving further left does not mean moving higher in virtue.

[elliotto]

It's difficult to make the claim that the AI not complying with a racist prompt is a positive signal for the organisation that wrote the racist prompt.

[not_a_bot_4sho]

> Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.

Centrism and compromise are the enemies of extremists.

[rsynnott]

> First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess.

I mean, _maybe_ about LLMs in general, in an abstract sense, if you're deeply concerned with LLM alignment. But not about grok, because it's an otherwise fairly generic LLM that is run by a company _so incompetent that it made said hamfisted instructions, or allowed them to be made_. Like, even beyond the ethics, the whole episode (and the subsequent holocaust-denial one) speaks to a totally broken organisation.

[fallingknife]

Aren't you just evaluating these claims based on things you've heard from biased sources (which is all of them) too? How do you know that your biased perspective is any more correct than Grok's bias?

[ActorNightly]

>which is all of them

Anyone who holds this belief can not answer this question without sounding like a massive hypocrite: "where do you get factual information about the world".

Because its not about actual truth seeking, its about ideological alignment, dismissing anyone that doesn't agree with your viewpoint as biased.

[wormlord]

How do I know the earth didn't spontaneously appear into existence yesterday? This line of argumentation is stupid.

[int_19h]

Grok itself repeatedly pointed out the bullshit in the claim.