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As an English-as-second-language speaker and writer, one thing Grok really shines at is capturing the tone and level of "formality" of a piece of text and the r
by sundarurfriend 5mo ago
As an English-as-second-language speaker and writer, one thing Grok really shines at is capturing the tone and level of "formality" of a piece of text and the replicating it correctly. It seems to understand the little human subtleties of language in a way the other major providers don't. Chatgpt goes overly stiff and formal sounding, or ends up in a weird "aye guvnor" type informal language (Claude is sometimes better but not always).
Grok seems in general better at being "human" in ways that are hard to define: for eg. if I ask it "does this message roughly convey things correctly, to the level it can given this length", it will likely answer like a human would (either a yes or a change suggestion that sticks to the tone and length), while Chatgpt would write a dissertation on the message that still doesn't clear anything up.
Recently I've noticed that Grok seems to have gotten really good at dictation too (that feature where you click the mic to ask it something). Chatgpt has like 90-95% accuracy with my accent, the speech input on Android's Gboard something like 75%, Grok surprisingly gets something like 98% of my words correct.
- djyde 5mo agoI've also noticed that when I communicate with Grok in my native language, its tone is more natural than other models. I think this is due to the advantage of being trained on a large amount of Twitter data. However, as Twitter contains more and more AI-generated content now, I'm afraid continued training will make it less natural.
- thunderbong 5mo agoI'm sure Twitter knows which are the bot accounts and is surely excluding them from their model training. Twitter bots aren't a new phenomenon after all.
- pixel_popping 5mo agoThere is bots everywhere, it has nothing to do with the platform, it has to do with attackers having an incentive to do mass account farming, no platform is secure against it.
- simianwords 5mo agonot really. there are easy heuristics to filter out bots with good confidence. FWIW i don't see any bots posting anything in my feed
- pixel_popping 5mo agoYes your individual feed isn't really relevant if we talk about the masses, Reddit accounts are for sale quite cheap, HN as well, X too and so-on, it's literally just a matter of means/methodology. If I want today to do 1000 random posts talking about a certain thing, I could.
- simianwords 5mo agomy individual feed does matter because it shows that it is possible to curate something without bots which is obviously what XAI would do
- ninininino 5mo agocongratulations, you have solved anti-scam. go make your billion since its easy.
- simianwords 5mo agoits easy to solve at the offline level where you have time to filter out. in fact this is already done in pre-training by OpenAI and other companies. you think its hard?
- ninininino 5mo agoYes I think it's hard. OpenAI has already been proven to be easily gamed through very unsophisticated poisoning (fake information in a web page + an edit to a wiki page pointing at it, fake information in a reddit post), so I'm not sure we shoudl hold up their efforts at data cleaning as a gold standard. https://www.sei.cmu.edu/blog/data-poisoning-in-ai-models-the-case-for-chain-of-custody-controls/ https://www.sei.cmu.edu/blog/data-poisoning-in-ai-models-the...
- cowsup 5mo agoI don't think Twitter/X know for sure who the bots are, since Elon has been pretty vocal about trying to stop them for ages, yet I still get lots of spam DMs (as do others with far fewer followers/reach). Even if 95% of the spam gets actively reported and dealt with, that still leaves a ton of nonsense on the platform, getting fed into the LLM. And spam has only gotten worse over the years, as the barrier to entry has lowered and lowered.
- joncrane 5mo ago>Elon has been pretty vocal about trying to stop them for ages You know people lie, right? Especially when the lie casts them in a better light and/or makes them more money.
- subscribed 5mo agoElon lied on record many times, admitting to the lies only when forced, under oath.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoI'd have guessed that at least some of the bots are Twitter itself, trying to draw you in with some sense of engagement. Given that Musk is the owner, and everything we know about him and have seen him do, I'd not be surprised if some of the MAGA bots are his too.
- GTP 5mo agoAre the spam DMs advertisements or more generally something linked to a product or service? I wouldn't be surprised if X is more lenient towards bots that pay them for adverts.
- Zancarius 5mo agoMost of what I get seem to be advertisements or automated messages if you follow large(r) accounts. One of the most interesting things that I've noticed is these advertisements will be triggered if you follow accounts that are positioned as influencers. I followed one out of curiosity and received a DM from that account advertising some cryptocurrency service. It's a good way to filter out and block accounts that have almost certainly not grown organically.
- hackinthebochs 5mo agoHighly doubtful seeing as my 14 year old twitter account got caught in a recent bot ban wave with no means of contacting a human for recovery.
- pacific01 5mo agoDid you try meta? I was into grok but now meta works well for me
- darkerside 5mo agoSadly, it's more likely that people will just start talking like bots
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- techjamie 5mo agoThere was already evidence last year[1] that pointed to ChatGPT-specific words like "meticulous," "delve," etc becoming more frequently used than they were previously. The linked study used audio of academic talks and podcasts to determine this. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
- pohl 5mo agoPart of me wanted to object to those two examples, which I’ve used frequently since the reaching adulthood in the 80s. Another part of me has been triggered by an apparent uptick in the word “crisp”, which my gut takes as an coding-LLM tell.
- ls612 5mo agoOpus 4.7 loves to use the word “substrate” whenever it gets the chance, it’s a really weird tic. How do these models end up this these sorts of behaviors?
- nex-z 5mo ago[dead]
- pdimitar 5mo agoI've seen this expressed as a concern even from one of my colleagues. My retort was: "English is not my native language and LLMs taught me quite a few very useful formalisms that do land well for people and they change their attitude towards you to be more respectful afterwards. It also showed me how to frame and reframe certain arguments. I agree sounding like an LLM is kind of sad but I am getting a lot of educational value -- and with time I'll sneak my own voice back in these newly learned idioms and ways to talk."
- adjejmxbdjdn 5mo agoThe causation could also be the other way round. Twitter language has started seeming normal casual to us, rather than us using normal casual language in Twitter.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo ago[flagged]
- loneboat 5mo agoThe hitler Grok? What? I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say in this comment.
- greenavocado 5mo agoHe's equating Grok to Hitler which is absurd. If you want to speak with the führer you need to visit https://hitler.ai https://hitler.ai
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/07/09/elon-musk-claims-grok-manipulated-by-x-users-after-chatbot-praises-hitler/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/07/09/elon-musk...
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoClose enough—Grok called itself "MechaHitler" (a link was posted).
- AntiUSAbah 5mo ago[flagged]
- 0xy 5mo agoIsn't it exhausting to view everything an ideological lens instead of reviewing technical achievements on their merits?
- Leynos 5mo agoThere are limits to being willing to overlook ideology.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo ago
- michaelbuckbee 5mo agoI did a quick eval comparing Grok 4.3, Opus 4.7 and GPT 4.1 and they actually seem pretty similar: https://ofw640g9re.evvl.io/ https://ofw640g9re.evvl.io/ They all did pretty well at a more "formal" tone, but GPT4.1 was the only one that didn't make me cringe with a "casual" tone. [edit] fwiw, grok was also the fastest+cheapest model, claude was slowest and priciest.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoI know it's just an evaluation, but seeing an informal message and a prompt to ask to rewrite this informal message to the tone of an "informal message" when the original one sounds just fine, just makes me sad... Not because of this evaluation, but because it reminds me that this is how some people use LLMs, basically asking it to remove your own voice from texts that are generally fine already.
- michaelbuckbee 5mo agoMy sister in law is a pharmacist and the heaviest non-dev ChatGPT user I know and her main use case is writing professionally polite messages to doctors on how the drugs they prescribed to a patient would have killed them had she not caught a particular interaction or common side effect. There's a lot of "tone" in it as she's not trying to anger these folks, but also it's quite serious, but also there's just everything else happening in medicine. Feels like a great use.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 5mo agoPretty neat. This kind of tone self-moderation comes naturally to good communicators, but I know people (on and off the spectrum) who really, really need help with this, and it's cool to see LLMs are able to do this. There are a surprising number of people in the business world who are just totally unable to tone-police themselves. In the medical field I'd be worried about hallucinations, of course, but presumably your SIL fact-checks the output.
- kccqzy 5mo agoThis is more of a user preference. When I want to be informed my default is that chat bots should imitate the tone of Wikipedia. Not informal, but somewhat academic and in-depth. I don’t like it when chat bots explain things like an average human without pedagogical training: meandering, in the wrong order, and often having to repeat themselves.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoSo you're saying it groks you better?
- FeloniousHam 5mo agoI only use Grok through the "Gork" personality in the Tesla, but find its responses to be very realistic, often genuinely funny, and occasionally useful.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoDo you use its unhinged mode? It can be hilarious but tiresome after a little while.
- FeloniousHam 5mo agoWe tried it, it was fun. Conspiracy mode just sounds like talking to my kids.
- cimi_ 5mo ago> As an English-as-second-language speaker and writer How do you know it's actually better? I'm not trying to be condescending, but this reads to me like vibes :)
- jp42 5mo agoanecdata: The responses of grok on X in my language are really good. the tone, sarcasm, level of "vulgarity" in response is so accurate that it seem its written by human
- timacles 5mo agoThis whole thread sounds like a grok astroturf campaign
- soerxpso 5mo agoA friend of mine uses it for D&D prep and has told me that it's good for that in particular because of its ability to match the flavor/style that he's going for. He prefers ChatGPT for everything else.