Grok AI Temporarily So Sycophantic It Claims Elon Musk Is The Best...

We human beings are a miraculous accident; Forces of improbability, on an unimaginable scale, created the correct conditions for our life on planet Earth. We've survived ice ages, plagues, and the threat of nuclear annihilation to get here. All we've got is each other.

I tell you this because I need you to understand: Our incredible march of human progress is only being temporarily embarrassed by the fact it's led to Elon Musk (a man so rich it'd take you over 1,200 years of a $1 million/day wage to get his net worth) accidentally making a robot so self-complimentary that it says he's really good at drinking pee.

This week, X users discovered that if you prompted Grok, the platform's own LLM, on questions surrounding Elon Musk, you could get it to glaze him on just about anything—those posts have since been deleted, though 404Media and RollingStone have preserved a few.

This is mostly sycophantic, unrealistic tripe—for instance, ranking him "among the top 10 minds in history" and saying he edges out basketball player LeBron James for "holistic fitness … Elon’s sustained grind—managing rocket launches, EV revolutions, and AI frontiers—demands a rarer blend of physical endurance, mental sharpness, and adaptability."

In one instance, Grok insisted that Elon Musk would be able to score four points in overtime during the Super Bowl. When asked to elaborate, Grok promptly broke: "data shows [relevant fact if known]." The future is now. We're not in a bubble. You're in a bubble, shut up.

Obviously, seeing how thoroughly fawning Grok was over its 'creator', the jesters of the internet immediately started getting it to say some truly heinous things by asking how Elon Musk compares to various famous figures in, er, other arenas. For example:

You get the idea. And if you don't, you cannot physically make me look at more of these. Musk later took to X to explain that "Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me." He then calls himself a slur to seem hip and cool with the kids.

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"Advesarial prompting" is a very interesting way to place the blame on X users—in the same way that it'd be 'self-destructive usage' if my microwave exploded and killed me. It's extremely likely that Musk took steps to make his own AI more self-complimentary. Which is a very normal and level-headed thing to do when you have more

Source: PC Gamer