In case you pay for Twitter (sorry, X), you now have entry to Grok, the corporate’s AI bot. A part of that privilege consists of entry to a trending information feed within the Discover tab powered by the corporate’s synthetic intelligence. The one challenge? It is rubbish.
This is how Grok’s trending information feed appears to work: The bot pulls collectively the “prime” posts regarding any given information story, then generates a abstract of the information from these posts. Easy sufficient, and one thing that we have seen generative AI do earlier than. However earlier than you fireplace your human writers and editors and put Grok accountable for the information, you would possibly wish to see how precisely it is reporting works.
Grok seems to be aggregating joke tweets and spitting out an AI-generated reply as real information. You may see that from this post shared by X user BrettRedacted following the earthquake that shook much of the New York City metro area. The bot generated the headline: “Adams vs. Earthquake: 50,000 Cops in Subway Showdown,” then experiences how New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams is deploying the NYPD to “forestall additional earthquakes,” contemplating utilizing “robo cops,” and has ordered “each cop within the metropolis” to “shoot the rattling earthquake earlier than it strikes once more.”
Positive, we reside in bizarre instances, however no affordable particular person would ever consider that Grok’s abstract of the information was correct. In case you in some way could not resolve for your self, you would check out the highest posts fueling that information abstract, which on this case, are all joke tweets in regards to the mayor’s response to the earthquake.
It is a unhappy however humorous instance of the state of X in 2024. Previous variations of the location would have been the place to be to comply with each respectable updates on breaking information just like the NYC earthquake, and chortle on the jokes in regards to the scenario. Now, the location treats the jokes as information. You get what you pay for, I suppose.
It does not take a lot foresight to think about how this example goes from unhappy however humorous to easily harmful. What occurs when Grok decides to “report” on one thing that appears at first look respectable, however relies on the rampant misinformation spreading across the site? An X person could verify into the Discover web page to see that their metropolis is being bombed, or {that a} candidate of their election did one thing unlawful, when neither “story” is definitely true.
Whereas we won’t cease the location from pushing this crap, we will all collectively comply with not deal with Grok, or any generate AI for that matter, as a respectable information supply, or an correct summarizer of the day’s prime tales.
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