Grok’s antisemitism lays bare the emptiness of AI ethics
UNHERD:
What happened to Grok? Recent updates to the X website’s built-in chatbot have caused shockwaves, with Grok referring to itself as “MechaHitler”, propagating antisemitic talking points, fantasising about rape, and blaming Mossad for the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
The offensive posts have now been removed. At the time of writing, Grok seems unable to respond to X posts; the account’s timeline is bare except for a statement from xAI engineers about the “inappropriate posts” and ongoing work to improve Grok’s training. But why did this happen at all?
Elon Musk has long been a vocal advocate of free speech, and often boasts of his aspiration to make Grok “maximally truth-seeking”. Grok echoed this phrase in a post responding to criticism, stating its latest updates had been adjusted to “prioritise raw truth-seeking over avoiding discomfort”. But the bot’s spate of offensive posts doesn’t expose some truth hidden by political correctness. Rather, it highlights the confusion that results from conflating machine and human intelligence, and — relatedly — the very different impacts on machine and human intelligence of imposing moral constraints from the top down.
Philosophers and metaphysicians have grappled for millennia with the question of what we mean by “truth” and “consciousness”. In the modern age, and especially since the advent of computing, it has become commonplace to assert that “truth” is what’s empirically measurable and “consciousness” is a kind of computer. Contemporary AI hype, as well as fears about AI apocalypse, tends to accept these premises. If they are correct, it follows that with enough processing power, and a large enough training dataset, “artificial general intelligence” will crystallise out of a supercomputer’s capacity to recognise patterns and make predictions. Then, if human thought is just compute, and we’re building computers which vastly out-compute humans, obviously the end result will be a hyper-intelligent machine. After that, it’s just a matter of whether you think this will be apocalyptically good or apocalyptically bad.