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Grok's white genocide fixation caused by 'unauthorized modification'
- belter 1y agoThe code was ready but was committed too soon ;-)
- sussmannbaka 1y ago[flagged]
- throw310822 1y agoAt least the replies didn't end abruptly with covfefe.
- davedx 1y agoThe username was emon.fusk@xai.com apparently. I heard as punishment he's been promoted
- luma 1y agoThis is going to take some Batman level detective work
- noworriesnate 1y agoI think you’re underestimating how many whites care about the situation in South Africa. Most people I know care about the situation and are concerned. It could have been any white who worked there. You can’t just fire all of them.
- growlNark 1y ago[flagged]
- Kivern7 1y ago[flagged]
- growlNark 1y ago[flagged]
- Kivern7 1y ago[flagged]
- noworriesnate 1y ago[flagged]
- noworriesnate 1y agoYeah the main problem is lack of awareness, not indifference to something people are already aware of. In-group preference is a self preservation instinct in this case, and I’m confident in people’s ability to understand that instinctively. Not having in-group preference is like not caring more about your own mother than just any random older woman. Everybody cares about their mother, even if their relationship is strained. It’s the same in this case.
- growlNark 1y agoI don't think this is about in-group, out-group behavior. This is about how well you can look up claims on the internet and what recourse you have to evaluate these claims when there's conflict. Anyway, how much do Afrikaners really share with white Americans in the first place? I'm skeptical of claims that we share any culture or identity to begin with. To presume in-group, out-group behavior, you have to truly believe in the universality of whiteness on a level I just cannot fathom. And this mindset comes with corollaries that are probably wildly unacceptable to mention on this forum.
- 1y ago
- Kivern7 1y ago[flagged]
- notahacker 1y ago[flagged]
- Kivern7 1y ago[flagged]
- notahacker 1y ago[flagged]
- Kivern7 1y ago[flagged]
- op00to 1y agoIs this sarcasm?
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fundatus 1y agoWait, did Elon override the code review policy and merge straight to master?
- pavlov 1y agoDoes X have code review policies? That seems like the kind of pseudo-socialist red tape that blocks 100x engineers from getting things done.
- gregoriol 1y agoElon doesn't know how to code. But his Doge-teens would do anything to please their master.
- XorNot 1y agoIf there's one thing the past 10 years have taught me, its that the supply of people who'll go set themselves up as the obvious fall guy is endless for some reason.
- rsynnott 1y agoI mean, the implication is that it was just a change to the prompt, so could be done (incompetently, given the comically bad result) by any old idiot.
- timbit42 1y agoDid he not code at PayPal? Did he not write a computer game when he was a kid?
- armitage__ 1y agoIt's unlikely that Elon would know how to do that.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe system prompt might just be a textarea in some internal webform.
- 1y ago
- Fraterkes 1y agoI thinks it's funny that most arguments against ai-safety regulation argue that the west may fall behind and the sota ai may be developed by bad actors, but here's one of our biggest ai companies giving complete access to a "rogue actor" and it is treated like a routine snafu. Is ai a matter of national security or not?
- Fraterkes 1y ago(I get that its probably a coverup, but "by their logic" a rogue actor getting access should be an even bigger scandal than if Elon did it personally)
- pixl97 1y agoWe all know Elon is the rogue actor.
- arrowsmith 1y agoHas Elon publicly spoken about the idea that Afrikaners are being genocided? Given his politics and heritage, I would assume he thinks this claim is true. But the rogue actor hacked Grok to make it say the claim is false.
- Philpax 1y agoYes. Scroll through his recent feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk https://xcancel.com/elonmusk (Man, I'd blocked him years ago. I hadn't realised how bad it'd gotten.)
- notahacker 1y agoThe "rogue actor" acted in a way which made it constantly refer to the claim irrespective of context. It of course says the claim is false, but in the way you'd expect an LLM trained on the internet the issue to respond to a prompt to "always tell the truth about white genocide". This is the sort of thing you'd expect someone living in particular X bubbles where "white genocide" is both true and extremely important to think was worth adding to Grok's prompting, particular if they were outraged by seeing Grok responding in a similarly sceptical manner when directly asked about the issue. This is the sort of outcome you'd expect from someone who had high level access including the ability to inject prompts but lacked the time and attention to detail to validate the actual results. Elon certainly isn't the only person that could match this description, but frankly it's not unlike him and how he reacts to things on social media...
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago"On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST" Sigh. Get PST/PDT right or just say PT. (No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizona or Hawaii, the only parts of the US that use PST but do not observe DST.)
- sgarland 1y agoOr, you know, UTC. It is always baffling to me when large, global companies allow the use of anything else, especially in anything incident-adjacent.
- arrowsmith 1y agoI would be astonished if the average non-programmer knows what "UTC" means.
- Retr0id 1y agoSurely anyone who has ever had to coordinate across timezones is aware of UTC?
- peterfirefly 1y agoNo. The best you get is people having a vague notion of GMT.
- Retr0id 1y agoFrom the layperson perspective, I'd say GMT is basically the same thing
- arrowsmith 1y agoAnd British people reliably say "GMT" to mean "the current time in the UK", even when those aren't the same thing. (The UK is on BST for half the year, including right now.) Which of course is the same mistake as the PDT/PST thing that sparked this whole thread.
- ilikehurdles 1y agoI think what’s more interesting to come of this is that they’re now going to be publishing system prompts on GitHub.
- troupo 1y agoJust like they are "publishing" their algorithm? https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm hasn't been updated for two years
- phillipcarter 1y agoIt's already been published. There's nothing special in there. But publishing to GitHub doesn't mean anything if it's not actually the source of truth for where changes come from. A snapshot of a system prompt at some point in time is uninteresting.
- ilikehurdles 1y agoFrom xAI[1]: What we’re going to do next: - Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI. - Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident. We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can't modify the prompt without review. - We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail. [1]: https://x.com/xai/status/1923183620606619649 https://x.com/xai/status/1923183620606619649
- phillipcarter 1y agoYes, and it's going swimmingly well. Some real A+ people running the show over there: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/pull/3 https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/pull/3
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- awongh 1y agoBut how many times was the system prompt successfully changed with something more subtle and no one noticed?
- dmix 1y agoIf Grok is like ChatGPT which has tons of overtly baked in biases then probably all the time.
- wongarsu 1y agoGrok ironically seems much less biased than ChatGPT over all. It has far fewer strong opinions add isn't afraid of taking ill of Musk or Trump. The team responsible for training and alignment did a remarkably good job at being impartial. If it wasn't for that we might have fewer incidents of "rogue employees" messing with the prompt
- bhouston 1y agoA number of times it has been modified. It was answering that Elon Musk was a major spreader of misinformation along with Trump and then it was modified and it stopped saying that and this is what it reported as its system prompt at the time it stopped: https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf Details here: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-grok-censoring-criticism-of-elon-musk-and-donald-trump https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-...
- metalman 1y ago"my what robust deniability you have" ................... "the better to......"
- curious_mind87 1y ago[flagged]
- micromacrofoot 1y agohmmm going to be hard to narrow down who at twitter has a history with south africa, the authority to push to production, and is up at 3am... maybe they should get the feds on this one
- JohnHaugeland 1y agoSubtext: the unauthorized modification was resistance from someone who didn't want the subtle version going unnoticed
- andrewflnr 1y agoPossibly giving Xitter too much credit, but an interesting possibility.
- SEJeff 1y agoUnauthorized aka Elon got backend root and made some changes to help his rw narrative.
- EasyMark 1y agoAs in "if y'all say I did this, I know the President and DHS Secretary -very- well"?
- ninetyninenine 1y agoA lot of people working for Elon hate him. So I’m sure some employee just did this before he quit.
- hersko 1y agoNah, if it was an employee who quit they would say that. The fact that they didn't mention firing the employee who did it means either: 1 - It was some super valuable 10x guy 2 - (more likely) it was Elon Musk
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoDid Apple mention firing the dev(s) who had voice to text replace "Trump" with "Racist" in iOS?[1] Did Google mention firing the dev(s) who blocked Gemini from generating photos of white people?[2] Most likely no people were fired in either of such cases because they were only following orders from above congruent to the company's internal political and cultural biases, or if they were acting rogue, they got hefty severance packages in exchanged for signing NDAs not to talk to the press about the toxic and possibly illegal things going on inside the company. But either way, no company wants to publicly talk about firing rogue workers since its bad press no matter how you slice it, plus its an admission of guilt of company's culture being rotten or even illegal behind the scenes. They just deny and call it a bug then stay quiet while changing things behind the scene till people forget about it. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/technology/iphone-dictation-trump-racist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/technology/iphone-dictati... [2] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/googles-ai-gemini-faces-backlash-for-failing-to-generate-images-of-white-people/articleshow/107940178.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/googles-...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mpalmer 1y agoHard to avoid getting political on stories like this! It continues to be striking to me that the conspiratorial tone and style of right wing politics - accusing the left of every underhanded tactic possible, up to and including controlling social media narratives - turns out to be their playbook to the letter.
- nyeah 1y agoGot to get those rogue employees under control. Maybe HR can help.
- bhouston 1y agoIt is pretty clear someone is just messing around with the Grok built-in system prompt every time there is a new hot button issue were Grok's default conflicts with what Elon Musk wants. This happened with Grok saying that Elon Musk & Trump were disinformation spreaders. Here is Grok giving outs its system prompt fix for that "issue": https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-grok-censoring-criticism-of-elon-musk-and-donald-trump https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-...
- aqme28 1y agoThis whole saga has been very funny to watch, but it's also very dark and concerning. This one was very sloppy, but in truth, the owners in charge of these models have tons of power to editorialize behind the scenes. And they are going to use those powers.
- jaoane 1y ago[flagged]
- superblas 1y agoBecause this follows what the Associated Press style guide suggests and it’s either in enough of the training data to be followed, or, OpenAI purposefully made it follow a style guide that happened to contain this rule after the fact when generating responses? https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566... Why do _you_ think this is the case?
- ffsm8 1y ago[flagged]
- rayiner 1y agoIronically, by flippantly dismissing the concern about the issue, you’re also dismissing the motivations of the people who championed the term and encouraged its adoption. They certainly think it’s important. Labels are very important! The term “Hispanic” was created in an effort to politically organize disparate Hispanic populations, who identified with myriad different nationalities rather than a common race (“La Raza”). Capitalizing “black” is a political statement, not a linguistic description. In English, races aren’t capitalized, while terms referring to distinct ethnic groups are (so you capitalize “German” but not “white”). As John McWhorter persuasively explains, rationale for capitalizing “Black” is that American descendants of slaves are a distinct group bound by shared history and culture. That’s fine insofar as “Black” is used to refer to what we might call “ADOS.” But in practice “Black” is used as a racial designator. At Harvard, for example, 40% of the “Black” students are african immigrants. Obama is “Black”—that describes his race, not his ethno-cultural group. Capitalizing “black” is a political effort to center the experience of black people in American life. Consider the term “BIPOC,” which breaks out “black” and “indigenous” as first among equals even though they’re included in the “POC.” What is the intention of that? These labels and classifications, in turn, have real world ramifications. My daughter’s school has a segregated “black girl magic” lunch every week. There’s no “half white half bangladeshi girl magic,” and few non-black, non-white students, so she was invited to attend the weekly lunch once a month. Even at age 12, my daughter is able to perceive there is a racial hierarchy designed to invert the historical one.
- op00to 1y agoI wish there was a blocklist for HN, because threads like these are goldmines for finding accounts that I could start ignoring to greatly increase the signal to noise ratio.
- krapp 1y agoYou can find plugins for your browser of choice. I use Comments Owl for HN for Firefox.
- nataliste 1y agoI don't have a blocklist, but I had the same thought and built a userscript to allow single-click blocking of particular user's submissions and comments: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/534728-hacker-news-content-blocker-replies-stories-with-persistence-and-block-button https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/534728-hacker-news-content...
- op00to 1y agoglad it wasn't me you wanted to block :D
- riidom 1y agoshould probably have said "rogue employer", and not "rogue employee"
- rsynnott 1y agoThe 3am bit is a particularly funny aspect to the whole thing. Someone should perhaps try getting a bit more sleep.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoEarlier on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001190
- croes 1y agoIs that the kind of security we cam also expect from the DOGE team?
- dira3 1y agoThe flagging of any coverage of this incident on HN is relentless!
- adrr 1y agoIf it was any other AI provider like ChatGPT or Gemini, it wouldn't be flagged. Big deal when a major player allows employees to just to change the prompts.
- mvdtnz 1y agoIt's not HN users causing this, there's a sustained effort by HN/YC stakeholders.
- dang 1y agoThat's incorrect. It's user flags.
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- ethbr1 1y agoNever assume conspiracy. There's a non-trivial amount of HN isers cheering for Team Musk (because move fast and break everything) and a larger part that's just sick of American news (especially anything Trump/Musk related).
- EasyMark 1y agoI doubt it, there are still a -lot- of EM fans here who would flag this sort of thing.
- pvg 1y agoThings like that don't get flagged out of Muskfandom.
- suzzer99 1y ago
- dcchambers 1y agoAnother Grok post flagged. Surprise, surprise. The trust is already broken. They can claim they will open source the system prompt all they want but there's no point in believing what they say. Elon clearly does what Elon wants to do.
- nineplay 1y agoIt is extraordinary to me how easily 'politically incorrect' stories have been suppressed on HN. I've always found this site over the top in its support of free speech. Posters angrily railed against hate speech laws. Any attempt to regulate sites with immoral or illegal content was considered a attack on our fundamental rights. Now we have a sizable contingent of posters who have decided that some stories are too dangerous for open discussion. This surprises me is that there is no large scale effort to fight back against these 'flagged' topics. Where have our free speech fighters gone? Let us be honest in that they really only believed "free speech more me but not for thee".
- init2null 1y agoYou'll see the Grok genocide story got posted five times... so they ended up getting one flag and four dups. People are trying, but oppression is easy on here, and the power to prevent a flagging is concentrated. People comment on flagging only to be ignored by the management, and repost those suppressed stories to no effect. It's probably best to give up with the website and use an RSS reader. I also turn on hidden comments. The censorship can be mostly avoided.
- nineplay 1y agoI could hide my head in the sand and imaging that the 'flaggers' are taking advantage of a loophole in the HN moderating system but I don't believe that anymore. > People comment on flagging only to be ignored by the management This still PG's site and I have no illusions about where his allegiances lie. The whole lot of them care for nothing but their own power and wealth.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago> someone had modified the AI bot’s system prompt, If you were responsible for the releases of your flagship chat bot, how many layers of control do you think you would have over the system prompt, arguably its most important (and potentially damaging) component? Either: 1. There was no rogue employee. 2. xAI doesn't know how to ship production code.
- ethbr1 1y ago3. xAI fired the people who knew how to ship production code. Or they left.