It's disturbing (though telling) that HN has enough Elon sycophants to moderate our discussion like this. Another example of how HN's community eschews real technical discussion to maintain the illusion of unconditional progress.
AStonesThrow · 5h ago
It will only get worse as the fluoridated water supplies run out
vFunct · 6h ago
Elon decided he wanted to have Grok respond positively to allegations of “white genicode” in South Africa so he had his xAI engineers rewrite the system prompts to support the idea that “white genocide” exists. It then started talking about “white genocide” at every unrelated opportunity.
Really unethical AI behavior by Elon.
minimaxir · 6h ago
To be clear, this is speculation, albeit a valid application of Occam's Razor.
nkurz · 5h 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.
minimaxir · 5h ago
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.
watwut · 1h ago
Elon makes himself look bad regularly in pretty much this way tho.
btreecat · 3h ago
It must of have been "deep-twitter" because a billionaire must be smart right?
vFunct · 1h ago
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".
OJFord · 5h ago
First I'm hearing of it all, but no, that's clear conspiracy theory territory, Musk makes some intervention like that and then X AI publishes TFA about the 'unauthorised' action 'circumventing' established processes etc.? No, Occam is not satisfied.
(Obligatory that's not what the razor is about anyway: it's that give a bunch of otherwise equally probable explanations, the simplest is likely the correct one; not just what's the simplest possible hypothesis you can imagine that is the answer.)
A CEO force-merging a change to production would indeed be an "unauthorized action circumventing established processes" by exact words.
I agree it's ridiculous, but it's mostly because the alternative hypotheses make no sense. There's making a change to a prompt without testing or review (e.g. the ChatGPT sycophancy incident), and then there's prompting a LLM with a very specific response that is not relevant to most people.
monkeydreams · 6h ago
It was confirmed by Grok so....
minimaxir · 5h ago
The Grok screenshot that went around only said that it was given a command to talk about the issue, which is corroborated by this official tweet. (as an aside, "confirmed by Grok" is generally not strong evidence because it is a LLM)
It did not confirm that Elon Musk did it which is a very specific allegation.
bigyabai · 6h ago
> Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub.
You guys remember when Elon promised to do that with the Twitter algorithm and conveniently forgot to update it after his grand gesture of transparency?
Have anyone ever considered things like this had been happening for decades already
i.e., that some people with power have been implanting certain ideas into the media?
"think tanks"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43993332
Really unethical AI behavior by Elon.
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.
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.
This was done by Musk, instructing his subordinates to alter system prompts to support his theory of "white genocide".
(Obligatory that's not what the razor is about anyway: it's that give a bunch of otherwise equally probable explanations, the simplest is likely the correct one; not just what's the simplest possible hypothesis you can imagine that is the answer.)
A CEO force-merging a change to production would indeed be an "unauthorized action circumventing established processes" by exact words.
I agree it's ridiculous, but it's mostly because the alternative hypotheses make no sense. There's making a change to a prompt without testing or review (e.g. the ChatGPT sycophancy incident), and then there's prompting a LLM with a very specific response that is not relevant to most people.
It did not confirm that Elon Musk did it which is a very specific allegation.
You guys remember when Elon promised to do that with the Twitter algorithm and conveniently forgot to update it after his grand gesture of transparency?
Pepperidge Farm remembers: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm