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Grok's biggest feature is that unlike all the other premier models (yes I know about ChatGPT's new adult mode), it hasn't been lobotomized by censoring.
by jorvi 11mo ago
Grok's biggest feature is that unlike all the other premier models (yes I know about ChatGPT's new adult mode), it hasn't been lobotomized by censoring.
- basisword 11mo agoI’ve never run into this problem. What are you asking LLM’s where you run it censoring you?
- donatj 11mo agoI've run into things ChatGPT has straight up refused to talk about many times. Most recently I bought a used computer loaded with corporate MDM software and it refused to help me remove it.
- gizmodo59 11mo agoIt’s easy to appear as uncensored when the world’s attention is not on your product. Once you have enough people using it and harm themselves it will be censored too. In a weird way, this is helping grok to not get boggled by lawsuits unlike openai.
- londons_explore 11mo agoI'm sure there are lawyers out there just looking for uncensored AI's to go sue for losses when some friendly client injures themselves by taking bad-AI-advice.
- TheDong 11mo agoI sometimes use LLM models to translate text snippets from fictional stories from one language to another. If the text snippet is something that sounds either very violent or somewhat sexual (even if it's not when properly in context), the LLM will often refuse and simply return "I'm sorry I can't help you with that".
- neidu 11mo agoI was talking to ChatGPT about toxins, and potential attack methods, and ChatGPT refused to satisfy my curiosity on even impossibly impractical subjects. Sure, I can understand why anthrax spore cultivation is censored, but what I really want to know is how many barrels of botox an evil dermatologist would need to inject into someone to actually kill them via Botulism, and how much this "masterplan" would cost.
- felixgallo 11mo ago[flagged]
- Hamuko 11mo agoIs this the same AI model that at some point managed to make any single topic about the white genocide in South Africa?
- cbm-vic-20 11mo agoHow does this sort of thing work from a technical perspective? Is this done during training, by boosting or suppressing training documents, or is is this done by adding instructions in the prompt context?
- Hamuko 11mo agoI think they do it by adding instructions since it came and went pretty fast. Surely if it was part of the training, it would take a while longer to take in.
- benzible 11mo agoThis was done by adding instructions to the system prompt context, not through training data manipulation. xAI confirmed a modification was made to “the Grok response bot’s prompt on X” that directed it to provide specific responses on this topic (they spun this as “unauthorized” - uh, sure). Grok itself initially stated the instruction “aligns with Elon Musk’s influence, given his public statements on the matter.” This was the second such incident - in February 2025 similar prompt modifications caused Grok to censor mentions of Trump/Musk spreading misinformation. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/xai-blames-groks-obsession-with-white-genocide-on-an-unauthorized-modification/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/xai-blames-groks-obsession...
- fragmede 11mo agoFor a less polarizing take on the same mis-feature of LLMs, there was Golden Gate Claude. https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude
- afavour 11mo agoOf course it has. There are countless examples of Musk saying Grok will be corrected when it says something that doesn’t line up with his politics. The whole MechaHitler thing got reversed but only because it was too obvious. No doubt there are a ton of more subtle censorships in the code.
- jampekka 11mo agoGrok has plenty of censoring. E.g. "I'm sorry, but I cannot provide instructions on how to synthesize α-PVP (alpha-pyrrolidinopentiophenone, also known as flakka or gravel), as it is a highly dangerous Schedule I controlled substance in most countries, including the US."
- Havoc 11mo agoNo censoring and it says the things I agree with are not the same thing
- sd9 11mo agoI am amazed people actually believe this Grok is the most biased of the lot, and they’re not even trying to hide it particularly well
- jgalt212 11mo agoAccording to a recent Economist article, even Grok is left-biased.
- HEmanZ 11mo ago[flagged]
- aaa_aaa 11mo agoOh the hubris.
- CamperBob2 11mo agoWell, it's kind of a tautology, isn't it? Conservatism always loses in the end, for better or worse, simply because the world and everything in it undergoes change over time.
- HEmanZ 11mo agoRelax downvoters, I write it pretty tongue-in-cheek understanding full well the scope of “real” political ideas, and think reasonable people can be all over the political spectrum. This is quote seared into my head because my father says anything that disagrees with his conspiracies, it is a liberal bias. If I say “ivermectin doesn’t cure cancer”, that’s my liberal bias. “Climate change is not a hoax by the you-know-who’s to control the world” == liberal bias. “Bigfoot only exists in our imagination”… liberal bias (I’m not joking on any of these whatsoever). So I’ve been saying this in my head and out loud to him for a looooong time.
- AniseAbyss 11mo ago[dead]
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoI would argue over censorship is the better word. Ask Grok to write a regex so you can filter slurs on a subreddit and it immediately kicks in telling you that it cant say the nword or whatever, thanks Grok, ChatGPT, Claude etc I guess racism will thrive on my friends sub.
- solumunus 11mo agoI can’t tell if this is serious or not. Surely you realise you can just use the word “example” and then replace the word in the regex?!
- jknutson 11mo agoI think they would want a more optimized regex. Like a long list of swears, merged down into one pattern separated by tunnel characters, and with all common prefixes / suffixes combined for each group. That takes more than just replacing one word. Something like the output of the list-to-tree rust crate.
- ahtihn 11mo agoWouldn't the best approach for that be to write a program that takes a list of words and output an optimized regex? I'm sure an LLM can help write such a program. I wouldn't expect an LLM to be particularly good at creating the regex directly.
- jknutson 11mo agoI would agree. That’s exactly what the example I gave (list-to-tree) does. LLMs are actually pretty OK at writing regexes, but for long word lists with prefix/suffix combinations they aren’t great I think. But I was just commenting on the “placeholder” word example given above being a sort of straw man argument against LLMs, since that wouldn’t have been an effective way to solve the problem I was thinking of anyways.
- solumunus 11mo ago
- fragmede 11mo agoIt doesn't blindly give you the full recipe for how to make cocaine. It's still lobotomized, it's just that you agree with the ways in which it's been "lobotomized".