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XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

224 points by k33l0r 1y ago

sigmaisaletter 1y ago
> 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.
- sshine 1y ago
  The truth, conveniently timed.
- sigmaisaletter 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
        ethbr1 1y ago
        The irony of implicit connections in training data is funny. I.e. even if you create an explicit Tiananmen Square massacre-shaped hole in your training data... your other training data implicitly includes knowledge of the Tiananmen Square massacre, so might leak it in subtle ways. E.g. how there are many posts that reference June 4, 1989 in Beijing with negative and/or horrified tones? Which at scale, an LLM might then rematerialize into existence. More likely SOTA censorship focuses on levels above base models in the input/output flow (even if that means running cut-down censoring models on top of base models for every query). Would be fascinated to know what's currently being used for Chinese audiences, given the consequences of a non-compliant model are more severe.
      - ytpete 1y ago
        The "Golden Gate Claude" research demo [https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude 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...
  - alephnan 1y ago
    Wasn't the original mission of OpenAI being open and non-profit and all of that to avoid this corruption?
    - amarcheschi 1y 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 (...)
      - worik 1y ago
        Not just Tech CEOs
    - Planktonne 1y ago
      Yes, but they were lying.
  - anal_reactor 1y 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.
  - blueboo 1y 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
  - afavour 1y 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 1y 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?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - afavour 1y 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.
        FirmwareBurner 1y 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.
  - slowmovintarget 1y 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.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - sanderjd 1y ago
      lol, if anything there was way more wall to wall coverage of that here
    - mcphage 1y ago
      > and yet nobody here made nearly as much fuss about Google forced biases and discrimination. Maybe you weren't here for that, but... it was kinda a big deal.
    - UncleMeat 1y ago
      That was a #1 post on HN. In comparison, this thread is flagged.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        It was NO. 1 because Google just launched its new AI, it wasn't no.1 because it had discrimination built in.
  - ujkhsjkdhf234 1y 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 1y 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?
- 1oooqooq 1y 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.
pixelpoet 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
    - Xmd5a 1y ago
      BBBEE = Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment
    - MSFT_Edging 1y 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.
jl6 1y 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.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  It makes me morbidly curious what other 'fake genocides' you see as part of this epidemic of mislabeling ...
  - cmrdporcupine 1y 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- bgwalter 1y ago
  The broad definition is from the 1948 United Nations Convention: https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20110210-what-is-genocide.pdf 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.
  - MSFT_Edging 1y 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 1y ago
      Oh sure, my comment was addressing the general issue of perceived "genocide inflation". I have no knowledge about SA.
Copenjin 1y 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.
- Copenjin 1y ago
  I hope that all those that downvoted will end up working for the very mentally stable Elon, good luck guys. It would be a learning experience.
ZeroGravitas 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
[flagged]
neves 1y ago
Welcome to the our dystopian present. 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.
awongh 1y ago
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 1y 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.
- pragmatic 1y ago
  https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude Elon trying to amp white genocide.
  - awongh 1y ago
    Would they go to all the work of making a newly trained model, or would they just edit the system prompt?
- josefritzishere 1y 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.
incomingpain 1y ago
The linked Musk comment where a minor political leader is singing kill the white farmers: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2024-05-30-julius-malema-singing-shoot-the-boer-is-not-hate-speech-sca-rules/ 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.
- gpcr1949 1y 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 1y 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.
- 1659447091 1y ago
  >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. Are you suggesting that most of those murdered are white farmers? The "Third Quarter 2024/2025 Crime Stats Presentation" [pdf] from South African Police Service Crime stats [0] show between: October 2024 to December 2024 there were 6953 Murders in RSA.[pg 8] and of those there were 12 victims linked to the "farm/small holding" community [pg 32]. 5 farm dwellers, 4 employees, 1 Farmer, 1 Security, & 1 not specified. 12 people linked to farms (but only 1 Farmer murdered) in the last quarter of 2024 in a place with some of the highest murder rates in the world -- does Not white farmer genocide make, nor is it "significant violence against white farmers". There were 68 total "contact crimes" committed in Rural communities; and 187,892 "contact crimes" for RSA in that time. Contact crimes being violent crimes (and not counting sexual offenses or robbery) [0] https://www.saps.gov.za/services/crimestats.php https://www.saps.gov.za/services/crimestats.php
_tk_ 1y 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.
- AlecSchueler 1y 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...
  - ggregoire 1y ago
    The other discussion is flagged too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      Yes, I thought it was notable that they were both flagged because the other existed.
- tastyface 1y ago
  Because white supremacy is endemic in American culture (and tech).
- 93po 1y ago
  [flagged]
- lawn 1y 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.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ujkhsjkdhf234 1y 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250

224 points by k33l0r 1y ago

> 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.

sshine 1y ago
The truth, conveniently timed.
sigmaisaletter 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        The irony of implicit connections in training data is funny. I.e. even if you create an explicit Tiananmen Square massacre-shaped hole in your training data... your other training data implicitly includes knowledge of the Tiananmen Square massacre, so might leak it in subtle ways. E.g. how there are many posts that reference June 4, 1989 in Beijing with negative and/or horrified tones? Which at scale, an LLM might then rematerialize into existence. More likely SOTA censorship focuses on levels above base models in the input/output flow (even if that means running cut-down censoring models on top of base models for every query). Would be fascinated to know what's currently being used for Chinese audiences, given the consequences of a non-compliant model are more severe.
    - ytpete 1y ago
      The "Golden Gate Claude" research demo [https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude 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...
- alephnan 1y ago
  Wasn't the original mission of OpenAI being open and non-profit and all of that to avoid this corruption?
  - amarcheschi 1y 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 (...)
    - worik 1y ago
      Not just Tech CEOs
  - Planktonne 1y ago
    Yes, but they were lying.
- anal_reactor 1y 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.
- blueboo 1y 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
- afavour 1y 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 1y 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?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - afavour 1y 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.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y 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.
- slowmovintarget 1y 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.
inglor_cz 1y ago
[flagged]
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    lol, if anything there was way more wall to wall coverage of that here
  - mcphage 1y ago
    > and yet nobody here made nearly as much fuss about Google forced biases and discrimination. Maybe you weren't here for that, but... it was kinda a big deal.
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    That was a #1 post on HN. In comparison, this thread is flagged.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      It was NO. 1 because Google just launched its new AI, it wasn't no.1 because it had discrimination built in.
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y 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 1y 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?
1oooqooq 1y 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.

pixelpoet 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - Xmd5a 1y ago
    BBBEE = Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment
  - MSFT_Edging 1y 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.

jl6 1y 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.

idiotsecant 1y ago
It makes me morbidly curious what other 'fake genocides' you see as part of this epidemic of mislabeling ...
- cmrdporcupine 1y 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
bgwalter 1y ago
The broad definition is from the 1948 United Nations Convention: https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20110210-what-is-genocide.pdf 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.
- MSFT_Edging 1y 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 1y ago
    Oh sure, my comment was addressing the general issue of perceived "genocide inflation". I have no knowledge about SA.

Copenjin 1y 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.

Copenjin 1y ago
I hope that all those that downvoted will end up working for the very mentally stable Elon, good luck guys. It would be a learning experience.

ZeroGravitas 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago

[flagged]

neves 1y ago

Welcome to the our dystopian present. 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.

awongh 1y ago

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 1y 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.
pragmatic 1y ago
https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude Elon trying to amp white genocide.
- awongh 1y ago
  Would they go to all the work of making a newly trained model, or would they just edit the system prompt?
josefritzishere 1y 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.

incomingpain 1y ago

The linked Musk comment where a minor political leader is singing kill the white farmers: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2024-05-30-julius-malema-singing-shoot-the-boer-is-not-hate-speech-sca-rules/ 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.

gpcr1949 1y 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 1y 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.
1659447091 1y ago
>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. Are you suggesting that most of those murdered are white farmers? The "Third Quarter 2024/2025 Crime Stats Presentation" [pdf] from South African Police Service Crime stats [0] show between: October 2024 to December 2024 there were 6953 Murders in RSA.[pg 8] and of those there were 12 victims linked to the "farm/small holding" community [pg 32]. 5 farm dwellers, 4 employees, 1 Farmer, 1 Security, & 1 not specified. 12 people linked to farms (but only 1 Farmer murdered) in the last quarter of 2024 in a place with some of the highest murder rates in the world -- does Not white farmer genocide make, nor is it "significant violence against white farmers". There were 68 total "contact crimes" committed in Rural communities; and 187,892 "contact crimes" for RSA in that time. Contact crimes being violent crimes (and not counting sexual offenses or robbery) [0] https://www.saps.gov.za/services/crimestats.php https://www.saps.gov.za/services/crimestats.php

_tk_ 1y 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.

AlecSchueler 1y 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...
- ggregoire 1y ago
  The other discussion is flagged too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    Yes, I thought it was notable that they were both flagged because the other existed.
tastyface 1y ago
Because white supremacy is endemic in American culture (and tech).
93po 1y ago
[flagged]
lawn 1y 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.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ujkhsjkdhf234 1y 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250