#grok

#grok

Speaking from the SpaceX headquarters in South Texas on Monday, Secretary of Defense, sorry, War (and gargantuan stain on our patriotic conscience) Pete Hegseth announced Grok will join Google's Gemini to be a part of the Pentagon's new internal AI platform (GenAI.mil) later this month. "Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," he said. (Here's a fine example of this "leading model" in action.) "AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we're going to make sure that it's there."

Several governments and regulators have taken action over Grok's image tool, which is embedded in the X social media site and has provoked outrage as it allows users to manipulate images of women and children to remove their clothing and put them in sexual positions. The Musk-led company that developed Grok, xAI, said last week the ability to generate and edit images would be limited to paying subscribers on X.

deeply concerning reports

On Friday morning, the Grok account on X started responding to some users' requests with a message saying that image generation and editing are "currently limited to paying subscribers." The message also includes a link pushing people towards the social media platform's $395 annual subscription tier. In one test of the system requesting Grok create an image of a tree, the system returned the same message.

The Minister for Media, Patrick O'Donovan, has deactivated his X account, saying he is "uncomfortable" with the platform and its AI tool Grok, which has been criticised for allowing the creation of sexually-explicit images without consent. The Fine Gael TD confirmed the move after attending the Stripe Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in Dublin yesterday, where he was questioned by media about the controversy surrounding Grok and the wider misuse of artificial intelligence.

Ministers may quit platform as Grok 'undresses' women and children

One photorealistic Grok video, hosted on Grok.com, shows a fully naked AI-generated man and woman, covered in blood across the body and face, having sex, while two other naked women dance in the background. The video is framed by a series of images of anime-style characters. Another photorealistic video includes an AI-generated naked woman with a knife inserted into her genitalia, with blood appearing on her legs and the bed.

Twitter, also called X, the social media network owned and constantly used by the world's richest man as well as virtually every powerful person in the American tech industry, and on which the vast preponderance of national political figures also maintain active accounts, has a sexual harassment and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) problem. This has been true more or less since Elon Musk took it over, but this problem's latest and most repellent efflorescence is the result of one of Musk's signature additions as owner.

The research evaluated chatbots on hallucination rate, customer ratings, response consistency, and downtime rate. The chatbots were then assigned a reliability risk score from 0 to 99, with higher scores indicating bigger problems. Grok achieved an 8% hallucination rate, 4.5 customer rating, 3.5 consistency, and 0.07% downtime, resulting in an overall risk score of just 6. DeepSeek followed closely with 14% hallucinations and zero downtime for a stellar risk score of 4. ChatGPT's high hallucination and downtime rates gave it the top risk score of 99, followed by Claude and Meta AI, which earned reliability risk scores of 75 and 70, respectively.

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.

Grok's track record is spotty at best. But even by the very low standards of xAI, its failure in the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia is shocking. The AI chatbot has repeatedly misidentified 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who heroically disarmed one of the shooters, and claimed the verified video of his deed was something else entirely - including that it was an old viral video of a man climbing a tree.

X is testing a change to the way it handles links on iOS so that the buttons to like, reply, and repost will always be visible. Normally, when you click a link on X the page opens up and completely covers the original post. Apparently, this leads to fewer people clicking like or otherwise engaging with the content. A good chunk of people probably just don't return to Twitter at all after following an external link.

"After a thorough review of our Human Data efforts, we've decided to accelerate the expansion and prioritization of our specialist AI tutors, while scaling back our focus on general AI tutor roles. This strategic pivot will take effect immediately," the email read. "As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude."

Popular right wing influencer Charlie Kirk was killed in a shooting in Utah yesterday, rocking the nation and spurring debate over the role of divisive rhetoric in political violence. As is often the case in breaking news about public massacres, misinformation spread quickly. And fanning the flames this time was Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot, which is now deeply integrated into X-formerly-Twitter as a fact-checking tool - giving it a position of authority from which it made a series of ludicrously false claims in the wake of the slaying.

As Forbes reports, the issue stems from the chatbot's share button. Every time a user clicks the button from the bottom of a chat window, it generates a unique, shareable URL. While most users might assume it's a private link only accessible to the people they share it with, the link actually gets published on Grok's website, making the content discoverable on search engines.