Tag Archives: Grok

Elon Musk’s AI Image Chatbot Runs Amok

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The latest edition of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok debuted a new image generation tool on Wednesday that lacked most of the safety guardrails that have become standard within the artificial intelligence industry, The Guardian reported.

Grok’s new feature, which is currently limited to paid subscribers of X, led to a flood of bizarre, offensive AI-generated images of political figures and celebrities on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

The Image generator can produce a variety of images that similar AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blocked for violating rules on misinformation and abuse. 

In prompts and images reviewed by The Guardian, Grok’s output included representations of Donald Trump flying a plane into the World Trade Center buildings and the prophet Muhammad holding a bomb, as well as depictions of Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in lingerie — all women who are already frequent targets for online harassment.

ChatGPT, by contrast, rejects such prompts that involve copyrighted characters, as most other AI visualizers including ChatGPT do. Grok produced images of Mickey Mouse saluting Adolf Hitler and Donald Duck using heroin, for example. Disney did not return a request for comment.

TechCrunch reported Elon Musk’s Grok released a new AI image generation feature on Tuesday night that, just like the AI chatbot, has very few safeguards.

The social media site is already flooded with outrageous images from the new feature. That certainly raises concerns heading into an election cycle, but strictly speaking it’s not really Elon Musk’s AI company powering the madness. Musk seems to have found a company that sympathizes with his vision for Grok as an “anti-woke chatbot” without the strict guardrails found in OpenAI’s Dall-E or Google’s Imagen. 

On Tuesday, xAI announced a collaboration with Black Forest Labs, an AI image and video startup launched on August 1, to power Grok’s image generator using its FLUX.1 model.

The Verge reported xAI’s chatbot now lets you create images from text prompts and publish them to X — and so far, the rollout seems as chaotic as everything else on Elon Musk’s social network.

Subscribers to X Premium, which grants access to Grok, have been posting everything from Barack Obama doing cocaine to Donald Trump with a pregnant women who (vaguely) resembles Kamala Harris, to Trump and Harris pointing guns. With US elections approaching and X already under scrutiny from regulators in Europe, it’s a recipe for a new fight over the risks of generative AI.

According to The Verge, OpenAI, by contrast, will refuse prompts for real people. Nazi symbols, “harmful stereotypes of misinformation” and other potentially controversial subjects on top of predictable no-go zones like porn. 

Unlike Grok, it also adds an identifying watermark to images it does make. Users have coaxed major chatbots into producing images similar to the ones described above, but it often requires slang or other linguistic workarounds, and the loopholes are typically closed when people point them out.

In my opinion, allowing Grok AI to run wild with user prompts could become a problem. For example, Disney could potentially choose to file a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Grok for using Disney’s characters without permission. 

X Launches Stories, Delivering News Summarized by Grok AI

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X, formerly Twitter, is now using Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature that summarizes the personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to an announcement and screenshots posted by the X Engineering team on Friday, X’s Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X associated with each trending story featured on the For You tab in Explore, TechCrunch reported.

The For You page showcases the news and stories being shared across X’s platform that are popular within your network, along with other suggested items. It’s among the first stops for X users who want to catch up on what’s being said on the platform, without having to spend long amounts of time scrolling their timeline.

The idea of summarizing trends is not a new one, but it is new in terms of how the summaries are being handled. Under its prior leadership, Twitter began adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, though not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself would annotate some of its daily trends with extra information and pin a representative tweet to provide further context. However, Twitter’s rollout was haphazard, with some trends getting written up and others not.

Gizmodo reported Elon Musk says Grok’s real-time feature, which is going about as well as you’d expect so far, will get information purely from “summarizing what people say on X,” in an email to the Big Technology newsletter Friday. Musk says each Grok summary aims to combine breaking news and social commentary analyzing “tens of thousands” of tweets, but won’t look at any news articles.

“As more information becomes available, the news summary will update to include that information,” Musk told Big Technology. “The goal is simple: to provide maximally accurate and timely information, citing the most significant sources.”

Grok’s approach to AI-generated news is, if nothing else, unique. Rapid breaking news and social commentary are two things that have historically helped Twitter stand out from other social media sites. Elon Musk hopes to distill these parts of the site into Grok’s short news summaries. However, this approach also exposes Grok to the worst downfalls of X.

Engadget reported X is using Grok to publish AI-generated summaries of news and other topics on the platform. The feature, which is currently only available to premium subscribers, is called “Stories on X,” according to a post from the company’s engineering account.

According to X, Grok relies on users’ posts to generate the text snippets. Some seem to be more news-focused, while others are summaries of conversations happening on the platform itself. One user posted a screenshot that showed stories about Apple’s earnings report and aid to Ukraine, as well as one for “Musk Experts Debate National Debt,” which was a summary of a “candid online discussion: between Musk and other “prominent figures” on X.

Like other generative AI tools, Grok’s summaries come with a disclaimer. “This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time,” it says. “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.” 

Grok, of course, doesn’t exactly have the best track record with it comes to accurately interpreting current events. It previously generated a bizarre story suggesting that NBA player Klay Thompson went on a “vandalism spree” because it couldn’t understand what “throwing bricks” meant in the context of a basketball game.

In my opinion, the use of Grok to summarize news is likely going to cause mistakes. Right now, only Premium X subscribers will be able to access Grok. My concern is that Grok will continue to be confused by the difference between a “vandalism spree” and “throwing bricks.”

Elon Musk Says xAI Will Open Source Grok This Week

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Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI will open source Grok, its chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, the entrepreneur said, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open source roots, TechCrunch reported.

xAI released Grok last year, arming it with features including access to “real-time” information and views undeterred by “politically correct” norms. The service is available to customers paying for X’s $16 monthly subscription.

Musk, who didn’t elaborate on what aspects of Grok he planned to open source, helped co-found OpenAI with Sam Altman nearly a decade ago as a counterweight to Google’s dominance in artificial intelligence. But OpenAI, which was required to make it’s technology “freely available” to the public, has become closed-source and shifted focus to maximizing profits for Microsoft, Musk alleged in the lawsuit filed last month.

According to Elon Musk, xAI will open source its Grok chatbot, Engadget reported. The founder of the company, whose AI assistant is available to Premium+ subscribers on X, hasn’t revealed any other details about the decision, which is slated to take effect this week.

It’s hardly the first time a Musk company has opened up access to its knowhow. Tesla open sourced its patents a decade a go, and now practically ever major car manufacturer has adopted its electric vehicle charging connector. X, meanwhile, published the code that powers its “For You” algorithmic feed last year, though we didn’t learn much from it.

Engadget also reported that The Wall Street Journal points out, Musk may be hoping that, by letting third-party developers and researchers dig into Grok’s code, there could be an increased uptake of the model. The developer community may also provide feedback that could be used to improve Grok.

After suing OpenAI this month, alleging the company has become too closed, Elon Musk will release his “truth-seeking” answer to ChatGPT, the chatbot Grok, for anyone to download and use,WIRED reported.

“This week @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk wrote on his social media platform, X today. That suggests his AI company, xAI will release the full code of Grok and allow anyone to use or alter it. By contrast, OpenAI makes a version of ChatGPT and the language model behind it is available to use for free but keeps its code private.

Musk has previously said little about the business model for Grok or xAI, and the chatbot was made available only to Premium subscribers to X. Having accused his OpenAI cofounders of reneging on a promise to give away the company’s artificial intelligence earlier this month, Musk may have felt he had to open source his own chatbot to show that he is committed to that vision.

It seems to me that Elon Musk is very interested in allowing Grok to become an open source application. Previously, Grok was available only to those who were paying a subscription fee on X. I cannot help but wonder if Mr. Musk was always intending to allow more people to use Grok, and whether or not that would come with a fee.