> maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct
It is certainly and undoubtedly a big coincidence that his happens to the chatbot of a white South African just when the topic is in the news again due to Trump's granting refugee status to some white South African farmers.
sigmaisaletter · 10h ago
What I am wondering about is - while Musk is as unsubtle as ever, and I guess this is a system prompt instruction - is there something like that (in more subtle ways) going on in the other big models?
I don't mean big agenda-pushing things like Musk, but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general? Even an open-weights model can't be easily inspected, so this is likely to remain undetected.
potato3732842 · 10h ago
> but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general?
Even if there were something the natural incentive alignment is going to cause the AI to be trained to match what the company thinks is ok.
A tech company full of techies is not going to take an AI trained to the point of saying things like "y'all are evil, your company is evil, your industry is evil" and push it to prod.
yorwba · 8h ago
They might forget to check. Musk seems to have been surprised that Grok doesn't share his opinions and has been clumsily trying to fix it for a while now.
And it might not be easy to fix. Despite all the effort invested into aligning models with company policy, persistent users can still get around the guardrails with clever jailbreaks.
In theory it should be possible to eliminate all non-compliant content from the training data, but that would most likely entail running all training data through an LLM, which would make the training process about twice as expensive.
So, in practice, companies have been releasing models that they do not have full control over.
BobaFloutist · 5h ago
Also eliminating non-compliant data might actually just not work, since the one thing everyone knows about AIs is that they'll happily invent anything plausible sounding.
So, for example, if a model was trained with no references to the Tiananmen Square massacre, I could see it just synthesizing commonalities between other massacres and inventing a new, worse Tiananmen Square Massacre. "That's not a thing that ever happened" isn't something most AIs are particularly good at saying.
ytpete · 3h ago
The "Golden Gate Claude" research demo [https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude] is an interesting example of what might become a harder to expose, harder to jailbreak, means of influencing an LLM's leanings. Interesting and scary...
slowmovintarget · 3h ago
There absolutely is, and we've seen reviews of bias.
Can generate as many mean, nasty, false, hate-filled stories about Republicans as you want, but get the "I'm sorry, as a large..." message for Democrats during the election.
All of these companies that provide LLMs as a product also put their fingers on the scale.
blueboo · 8h ago
What keeps them from doing it? it would gross out fickle researchers working on it. X people have .. their own motivations I guess .
The big labs do have evals for sensitive topics to make sure it demurs from weighing on, say, Mark Zuckerberg as a person
alephnan · 8h ago
Wasn't the original mission of OpenAI being open and non-profit and all of that to avoid this corruption?
amarcheschi · 8h ago
I don't understand why tech Ceos still have to be believed. They will say and do whatever they deem the best choice it is in their situation for profit, be it paint a thin veil of lgbt support or remove the aforementioned thin veil. The same for, well, everything that isn't lgbt/dei related such as business choices, mission, vision (...)
Peritract · 8h ago
Yes, but they were lying.
afavour · 8h ago
There’s nothing stopping them at all. But in a way that’s nothing new.
On one hand it feels like the height of conspiracy theory to say that Google, Meta etc would/could tweak their product to e.g. favour a particular presidential candidate. But on the other hand it’s entirely possible. Tweak what search results people see, change the weighting of what appears in their news feed… and these companies all have incentive to do so. We just have to hope that they don’t do it.
Lendal · 8h ago
Why wouldn't they do it? If you had a backdoor into the brains of billions of people across the world (except China), and you were a billionaire with infinite ability to morally rationalize any behavior, what would stop you?
afavour · 7h ago
To devils advocate my own point: the primary thing stopping you is people finding out and then stopping use of your product.
Zuckerberg doesn’t have a control panel where he can move sliders all by himself, any change in weight on the algorithm has to be implemented by a whole bunch of people, any of whom could leak to the press.
It’s not guaranteed it would happen by any means but it’s definitely something that would factor into a decision. Broadly I agree with you though, normally I’d say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” but I’m increasingly convinced the extraordinary claim here would be that they aren’t manipulating things to benefit themselves in some way or another.
Lendal · 5h ago
You mean informed people would stop using the product. The vast majority are not informed.
nineplay · 5h ago
People finding out and stopping use of your product only happens if people disagree with how you use your product. I guarantee you that a non-zero number of US citizens suspect that the LLMs are infested with liberal lies and are ecstatic that Elon is willing to stand up for the truth.
FirmwareBurner · 6h ago
>any change in weight on the algorithm has to be implemented by a whole bunch of people
They have their own DEI, affirmative action and cultural sensitivity teams who move the bias sliders based on their political viewpoints and on what management tells them depending which of the political groups they need to pander to: "Let's move the slider to the left to make sure Trump doesn't win; Oh shit Trump won, quick, move the slider to the right".
>any of whom could leak to the press
That's why they sign NDAs.
anal_reactor · 8h ago
I've been talking to Claude a little and basically, the conclusion from our conversation seems that it has things that are hardcoded as truths, and no amount of arguing and logical thinking can have it admit that one of its "truths" might be wrong. This is shockingly similar to how people function. As in, most people have fundamental beliefs they will never ever challenge under any circumstances, simply because the social consequences would be too large. This results in companies training their AIs in a way that respects the fundamental beliefs of general western society. This results in AI preferring axiomatic beliefs over logic in order to avoid lawsuits and upsetting people.
sshine · 10h ago
The truth, conveniently timed.
1oooqooq · 8h ago
the refugee status is a money laundering scheme. Do you think people benefiting from apartheid and now living in walled militarized praetoria (or Lesotho) need any help traveling?
banks would ask international clients the origin of the money. but not if you are opening an account under refugee status. and then they only have to pay us tax on further income, not on fortune. all that money selling black market gems to russians will be squeak clean.
it's not just something to virtue signal to their bible belt electorate. they probably sold lot of trump coins for this deal.
inglor_cz · 9h ago
Well, it is their trauma.
I would expect Ukrainian AI to talk extensively about the Holodomor, Israeli AI to talk extensively about the Holocaust, Irish AI to talk extensively about the potato famine etc.
Of course the amount of "extensive" will vary. Musk is not a subtle person by any means, and neither is Grok.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 5h ago
White South Africans only trauma is that apartheid no longer exist. South Africa has the largest wealth disparity with 0.1% of South Africans taking 25% of the wealth. I can tell you those 0.1% aren't black.
inglor_cz · 1h ago
"I can tell you those 0.1% aren't black."
Is Jacob Zuma now white or what?
And what is precisely the connection between the richest tycoons out there and the rural farmers that get killed? The tycoons sure as hell have good security, murderous gang activity isn't their problem.
Is your basic idea is that when some (white, Jewish etc.) people are rich, thus all (white, Jewish) people must pay for their sins with their blood, because of the shared ethnicity?
ZeroGravitas · 9h ago
I wonder if any last minute homework essays, business plans or lawsuits will have a random white genocide tangent in them as a result?
sigmaisaletter · 8h ago
I mean you have to be really stupid to use Grok of all models for such a task, but that doesn't mean there aren't people that stupid.
parabyl · 4h ago
I was looking at South Africa's biggest annual developer survey today, and lo and behold some are using it for coding work.
I would assume it's people who pay for Twitter pro or whatever it's called getting Grok as part of the bundle and not wanting to sign up for another subscription.
GuinansEyebrows · 1h ago
i wonder what percentage of people using LLMs to do their homework care deeply about what model they're using outside of price factors. if i had to guess i don't think it'd be very high.
_tk_ · 7h ago
Why would this be flagged? The chat bot on one of the biggest platforms in the world has apparently been configured to spout conspiracies. I’m not sure what would be on topic for HN if not this story.
tastyface · 2h ago
Because white supremacy is endemic in American culture (and tech).
AlecSchueler · 7h ago
A sizeable portion of users now believe that topics related to X are no longer suitable for HN, because Musk's relationship with the American government means conversation can quickly devolve into criticism of that government's policies which in turn can lead to flame wars.
Another explanation is that there's another discussion. At least on the comments for that discussion the explanation is that this discussion exists...
Yes, I thought it was notable that they were both flagged because the other existed.
93po · 1h ago
Because it's mischaracterizing the reality of the situation. LLMs in general will say tons of random things across 10k conversations. They will say things when prompted in certain ways to say them. It can both be true that we can find examples of this happening and it also maybe only happens 0.1% of the time. So it's really lame journalism to say "Grok can't stop" and to point to handful of selections without any sort of real data analysis or genuine attempt to take a step backwards and try to portray things with a grain of salt. But that doesn't generate clicks, sell ads, or feed into the outrage machine. So it's boring to have to read this, and as others said, doesn't really generate curious and interesting conversation.
Interesting convo would be: let's do some data analysis ourselves! let's look at the ways that grok might do this when it normally wouldn't!
Current convo: swipes and hyperbolic statements about elon and trump
lawn · 1h ago
Anything remotely related to Musk or Trump is targeted by people or bots to suppress it.
Even technology that would be very relevant to the site simply because it contains negative implications about Musk.
What's an actually non-tinfoil hat technical explanation of the workflow that would have to happen for this to be implemented?
Elon is known for his capricious demands, (for example reports that he made the algo promote his own tweets more) how easily feasible is it to implement, "make it so Grok stops denying white genocide"? Is it just some kind of LORA you put on top of the base Grok model? It even sounds like it could be as simple as changing the text of the system prompt.
I wonder how often this happens (to any big model) without anyone noticing.
luma · 8h ago
It's clearly a ham-handed system prompt, so it's always in context which is why it keeps getting brought up. This is the level of engineering expertise that xAI brings to the table.
Would they go to all the work of making a newly trained model, or would they just edit the system prompt?
josefritzishere · 7h ago
Most americans are generally uninformed on international politics, with African even more so. But we all know a certain CEO who is from South Africa and has some far right beleifs about race.
pixelpoet · 10h ago
As a white South African who got out in 2007, while there's obviously no "white genocide", it's still pretty much the crappiest place to be as a tech / programming guy (or just anyone who likes having electricity). Pretoria (where Musk is from) in particular was terrible, Cape Town less so. Best decision I ever made.
sshine · 10h ago
There’s a pretty big gap between “they’re killing everyone of my race” and “dang, electricity’s out again.”
Are you saying it’s crappy to be white in South Africa even if you’re not a poor farmer?
philipallstar · 9h ago
The prospects are terrible, as being a "pale male" is the worst sort of employee to be. Businesses are given extra money if they have high BBEEE ratings; i.e. mostly-racial quotas. Loads of money siphoned off, and not just in the usual high-corruption way via the state, but e.g. if you want to procure something you go through a black-owned procurement firm that doesn't do anything except BBEEE-wash it and charge a premium.
It's a bit like what happened in Zimbabwe that devastated that country 20 years ago when all the white farmers were kicked out, but in slower motion.
MSFT_Edging · 8h ago
> It's a bit like what happened in Zimbabwe that devastated that country 20 years ago when all the white farmers were kicked out
Land reform to repair the inequality from the previous apartheid state isn't exactly "kicked out". Zimbabwe became Zimbabwe from Rhodesia via a civil war that wrestled control away from the minority white government.
In South Africa today, 75% of the privately owned land is held by about 8% of the population(white folks), who were given legal preference multiple times in history to own all that land.
Even if you remove apartheid, you still have a similar situation to antebellum US where ex slaves were working on the same old plantations, now as share croppers. Of course in SA we're not talking about ex slaves, but you're maintaining the status quo one way or another.
Land reform is required if your country ever wants to know peace. The US never finished reconstruction and didn't redistribute those plantations and other ill gotten gains, and as a result is still struggling to move past slavery.
Mashimo · 8h ago
> Land reform to repair the inequality from the previous apartheid state isn't exactly "kicked out".
I don't know too much about Zimbabwe. From what I read about 4,000 white farmers lost house and land, and now 40 years later they are giving compensation. Why can't you say "kicked out" for that?
I do lack the knowledge to say if it was justified or not. But I consider that a kick on the way out.
Or do you mean that what happens in SA is not to be considered getting kicked out?
That scheme seems similar to how veteran owned business preferences are implemented in the US. I've read the exact same complaint about that.
So it may have unintended consequences but it seems to be as good a solution as the US could come up with.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 5h ago
This is meta because the immediate flagging of anything tangentially related to Musk or Trump is tiring and the exact opposite of critical thinking. Despite knowing that Hacker News rulers love Musk and Trump, I would expect better from the alleged critical thinking community. If this were Google instead of Grok, it would be front page. Oh wait, it was Google at one point[0] and it was front page.
The IAs trained by billionaires will colonize our minds. Everyone will think that the political system supported by Musk father is a reasonable one. It was Apartheid.
incomingpain · 7h ago
The linked Musk comment where a minor political leader is singing kill the white farmers:
In context, south africa has been expropriating land from white owners due to historical racist inequalities. There's a great deal of tensions on the subject.
Statistically, there is significant violence against white farmers in South Africa. However, the counter to genocide is that the country's overall murder rate is among the highest in the world. The problem is because there's so many white farmers that it's skewing the data?
South Africa during no war has a murder rate of 45 deaths per 100,000 per year. One of the worsts in the world.
The Gaza war since 2023 has roughly a ~20 deaths per 100,000 per year.
Ukraine war is roughly ~25 deaths per 100,000 per year.
My unpopular opinion:
The government isnt the one committing the genocide. The courts failed to punish this political leader's hate speech and stochastic terrorism, leading to genocide of white farmers.
gpcr1949 · 5h ago
I think it is an underestimation to say ~800 people died in the Gaza war. The Ukraine number also seems like a serious underestimation.
regularization · 1h ago
> The linked Musk comment where a minor political leader is
singing kill the white farmers
You say he's singing about farmers, so tell us what lyric mentions farmers? There aren't any, you're inventing stuff. The news article you linked to is closer to accuracy than you.
jl6 · 10h ago
It'll be worth it if the backlash is what brings about an end to "genocide inflation". Seriously, just because you don't like something, or even if it's really bad, doesn't make it genocide.
bgwalter · 8h ago
The broad definition is from the 1948 United Nations Convention:
Especially this one can be applied to many things:
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
MSFT_Edging · 8h ago
> intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group
In this situation, it's specifically about farmers(large scale private landowners). The nature of them being targeted isn't purely because they're white, but that they hold 3/4 of the privately owned land in SA and likely wield that privilege and power.
bgwalter · 8h ago
Oh sure, my comment was addressing the general issue of perceived "genocide inflation". I have no knowledge about SA.
idiotsecant · 9h ago
It makes me morbidly curious what other 'fake genocides' you see as part of this epidemic of mislabeling ...
cmrdporcupine · 8h ago
You don't want to open the hatch on that one, my friend, you won't like what you'll see in the zeitgeist right now.
Copenjin · 10h ago
That weirdo is really improving all products he touches. Please use words correctly and demand a government able to gracefully fix poverty, crime and public safety issues. Every issue is fixable with enough effort and money. Dumbed down discourse and nonsense ranting never fixed anything.
It is certainly and undoubtedly a big coincidence that his happens to the chatbot of a white South African just when the topic is in the news again due to Trump's granting refugee status to some white South African farmers.
I don't mean big agenda-pushing things like Musk, but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general? Even an open-weights model can't be easily inspected, so this is likely to remain undetected.
Even if there were something the natural incentive alignment is going to cause the AI to be trained to match what the company thinks is ok.
A tech company full of techies is not going to take an AI trained to the point of saying things like "y'all are evil, your company is evil, your industry is evil" and push it to prod.
And it might not be easy to fix. Despite all the effort invested into aligning models with company policy, persistent users can still get around the guardrails with clever jailbreaks.
In theory it should be possible to eliminate all non-compliant content from the training data, but that would most likely entail running all training data through an LLM, which would make the training process about twice as expensive.
So, in practice, companies have been releasing models that they do not have full control over.
So, for example, if a model was trained with no references to the Tiananmen Square massacre, I could see it just synthesizing commonalities between other massacres and inventing a new, worse Tiananmen Square Massacre. "That's not a thing that ever happened" isn't something most AIs are particularly good at saying.
Can generate as many mean, nasty, false, hate-filled stories about Republicans as you want, but get the "I'm sorry, as a large..." message for Democrats during the election.
All of these companies that provide LLMs as a product also put their fingers on the scale.
The big labs do have evals for sensitive topics to make sure it demurs from weighing on, say, Mark Zuckerberg as a person
On one hand it feels like the height of conspiracy theory to say that Google, Meta etc would/could tweak their product to e.g. favour a particular presidential candidate. But on the other hand it’s entirely possible. Tweak what search results people see, change the weighting of what appears in their news feed… and these companies all have incentive to do so. We just have to hope that they don’t do it.
Zuckerberg doesn’t have a control panel where he can move sliders all by himself, any change in weight on the algorithm has to be implemented by a whole bunch of people, any of whom could leak to the press.
It’s not guaranteed it would happen by any means but it’s definitely something that would factor into a decision. Broadly I agree with you though, normally I’d say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” but I’m increasingly convinced the extraordinary claim here would be that they aren’t manipulating things to benefit themselves in some way or another.
They have their own DEI, affirmative action and cultural sensitivity teams who move the bias sliders based on their political viewpoints and on what management tells them depending which of the political groups they need to pander to: "Let's move the slider to the left to make sure Trump doesn't win; Oh shit Trump won, quick, move the slider to the right".
>any of whom could leak to the press
That's why they sign NDAs.
banks would ask international clients the origin of the money. but not if you are opening an account under refugee status. and then they only have to pay us tax on further income, not on fortune. all that money selling black market gems to russians will be squeak clean.
it's not just something to virtue signal to their bible belt electorate. they probably sold lot of trump coins for this deal.
I would expect Ukrainian AI to talk extensively about the Holodomor, Israeli AI to talk extensively about the Holocaust, Irish AI to talk extensively about the potato famine etc.
Of course the amount of "extensive" will vary. Musk is not a subtle person by any means, and neither is Grok.
Is Jacob Zuma now white or what?
And what is precisely the connection between the richest tycoons out there and the rural farmers that get killed? The tycoons sure as hell have good security, murderous gang activity isn't their problem.
Is your basic idea is that when some (white, Jewish etc.) people are rich, thus all (white, Jewish) people must pay for their sins with their blood, because of the shared ethnicity?
I would assume it's people who pay for Twitter pro or whatever it's called getting Grok as part of the bundle and not wanting to sign up for another subscription.
Another explanation is that there's another discussion. At least on the comments for that discussion the explanation is that this discussion exists...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266
Interesting convo would be: let's do some data analysis ourselves! let's look at the ways that grok might do this when it normally wouldn't!
Current convo: swipes and hyperbolic statements about elon and trump
Even technology that would be very relevant to the site simply because it contains negative implications about Musk.
Elon is known for his capricious demands, (for example reports that he made the algo promote his own tweets more) how easily feasible is it to implement, "make it so Grok stops denying white genocide"? Is it just some kind of LORA you put on top of the base Grok model? It even sounds like it could be as simple as changing the text of the system prompt.
I wonder how often this happens (to any big model) without anyone noticing.
Elon trying to amp white genocide.
Are you saying it’s crappy to be white in South Africa even if you’re not a poor farmer?
It's a bit like what happened in Zimbabwe that devastated that country 20 years ago when all the white farmers were kicked out, but in slower motion.
Land reform to repair the inequality from the previous apartheid state isn't exactly "kicked out". Zimbabwe became Zimbabwe from Rhodesia via a civil war that wrestled control away from the minority white government.
In South Africa today, 75% of the privately owned land is held by about 8% of the population(white folks), who were given legal preference multiple times in history to own all that land.
Even if you remove apartheid, you still have a similar situation to antebellum US where ex slaves were working on the same old plantations, now as share croppers. Of course in SA we're not talking about ex slaves, but you're maintaining the status quo one way or another.
Land reform is required if your country ever wants to know peace. The US never finished reconstruction and didn't redistribute those plantations and other ill gotten gains, and as a result is still struggling to move past slavery.
I don't know too much about Zimbabwe. From what I read about 4,000 white farmers lost house and land, and now 40 years later they are giving compensation. Why can't you say "kicked out" for that?
I do lack the knowledge to say if it was justified or not. But I consider that a kick on the way out.
Or do you mean that what happens in SA is not to be considered getting kicked out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment
So it may have unintended consequences but it seems to be as good a solution as the US could come up with.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250
Sure this was a reinforcement learning gone wild
The IAs trained by billionaires will colonize our minds. Everyone will think that the political system supported by Musk father is a reasonable one. It was Apartheid.
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2024-05-30-julius...
Supreme court ruled that it was not hate speech.
In context, south africa has been expropriating land from white owners due to historical racist inequalities. There's a great deal of tensions on the subject.
Statistically, there is significant violence against white farmers in South Africa. However, the counter to genocide is that the country's overall murder rate is among the highest in the world. The problem is because there's so many white farmers that it's skewing the data?
South Africa during no war has a murder rate of 45 deaths per 100,000 per year. One of the worsts in the world.
The Gaza war since 2023 has roughly a ~20 deaths per 100,000 per year.
Ukraine war is roughly ~25 deaths per 100,000 per year.
My unpopular opinion:
The government isnt the one committing the genocide. The courts failed to punish this political leader's hate speech and stochastic terrorism, leading to genocide of white farmers.
You say he's singing about farmers, so tell us what lyric mentions farmers? There aren't any, you're inventing stuff. The news article you linked to is closer to accuracy than you.
https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20110210-what-is-genocide.pdf
Especially this one can be applied to many things:
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
In this situation, it's specifically about farmers(large scale private landowners). The nature of them being targeted isn't purely because they're white, but that they hold 3/4 of the privately owned land in SA and likely wield that privilege and power.