Elon Musk touts the upcoming release of his ChatGPT competitor, Grok, yet another example of how his entire persona is just an organic LLM made by ingesting all of Reddit and 4chan. Grok already seems in many ways to be patterned after the worst of Elon’s indulgences, with the sense of humor of a hopelessly funny and retarded internet troll, and prejudices informed by a man whose horrible, dangerous prejudices are completely invisible to himself.
There are all kinds of reasons to be wary of Grok, including the standard reasons to be wary of any current LLM-based AI technology, such as hallucinations and inaccuracies. Layer in Elon Musk’s recent track record of disastrous social sensitivity and generally harmful approach to world-shaping issues, and we’re already looking at even more cause for concern. But the real danger is probably not yet that easy to spread, if only because we still have little understanding of the extent of the impact that widespread use of LLMs will have on our daily and online lives.
One key area where they already have and are sure to have a much bigger impact is user-generated content. We’ve seen companies already developing first-party integrations that are starting to adopt some of these uses, such as Artifact with its AI-generated thumbnails for shared posts and Meta adding chatbots to everything basic. Musk is debuting Grok on X as a feature initially meant for Premium+ subscribers, with a rollout that’s supposed to start this week.
Clearly, Musk is aiming to dangle Grok as a carrot to attract more subscribers to his more expensive subscription tier for dumpster fire X. X will also update Grok, which is his own cause for concern given that the network has has been a reliable source of information even since its not-so-stellar days as Twitter.
The real threat isn’t even a sad, disinformation-filled chatbot growing at scale on a network once heavily criticized by its current owner for being full of bots. No, the real danger is what happens if Musk’s AI mini-me starts drowning out the rest of the conversation — and what happens if other bigots with money see it get away with it.
Musk’s particular skill as such is a slanderous following with a willingness to accept his interpretation of reality, no matter how twisted or demonstrably untrue. But that’s nothing compared to an LLM trained in basically the same motivation, capable of not only parroting but also creating highly accurate prototype “views” and “perspectives” made from the clay of their maker and then quickly disseminating them with unlimited access to a network that still covers tens of millions of influential users.
The only advantage the many, many people who are not billionaires currently have over those who are is their abundance – the masses are the masses because of, well, their mass. While I’m sure there are many illegal offshore billionaire cloning efforts in response to this sticky math problem, it remains somewhat intractable. However, the advent of LLM-based chatbots threatens to destabilize the very concept of popular opinion, drowning out the voices of real users with countless artificials that are almost indistinguishable from authentic human beings.
We have already seen the demagogues of late-stage capitalism try to assert a “populist” perspective that has no basis in actually being the will of the people. So far, though, they’ve done it mostly through bald braggadocio. within a few iterations of the coming onslaught of LLM-powered chatbots, they could have the artificial but convincing numbers to support their malicious interpretations of the world.