To say Elon Musk is a fascinating individual would be an understatement. In the blink of an eye, he turns from brilliant to bozo and back again. It’s like witnessing a fast-paced ping-pong game.
Musk’s most recent project, Grok, is an AI built on X (previously known as Twitter) material that I hope will disrupt conversational AI. In many circumstances, shaking up a new market is a good thing since, all too often, everyone starts mimicking each other, resulting in a lot of similar and more monotonous offerings. Musk does a lot of things, but none of them are uninteresting, with the exception of the company of the same name.
The Benefits
We don’t seem to enjoy making fun of things, which I believe is unfortunate. While I dislike many aspects of Tesla, I do appreciate the quirkiness in its execution, which must bring a grin to Tesla drivers’ faces. As an example:
The Tesla can mimic the sounds of a Jetson automobile.
On the navigation screen, you can switch between a selection of wild automobiles.
When someone sits in one of the seats, it can emit a fart sound.
You can sing karaoke in the car, which Tesla calls Caraoke.
Tesla has a “bioweapon defense mode,” which is essentially just a good in-car air filter, but I like the name—plus a slew of Easter eggs, such as James Bond’s submersible Lotus.
Tesla was the first to let you use your phone or a card as a car key, allowing the doors to open automatically when you approach.
On a hot day, it offers a dog mode to keep your pets cool in the car.
If your children are in the car, you can restrict inappropriate song lyrics – or leave them unblocked to teach your neighbor’s children new vocabulary!
So there’s a strong chance Musk’s Grok AI will be entertaining to use. Assuming it ultimately works as stated, and given that most items of this type have early teething troubles and crashes, I believe it could be a fun way to pass the time when traveling or killing time.
Because so much of the news is bad, we need more whimsy in our lives. There are two big battles going on, both of which might grow and spread to nuclear weapons, and politics has gotten so bad that reading or watching the news is nearly painful. So, in this Debbie Downer world (SNL reference), most people should welcome a little levity.
Grok, on the other hand, has several issues.
The disadvantages ( Not too bad )
To begin, you must be an X Premium member in order to use Grok. That will set you back $16 per month. ChatGPT costs $20 per month, but it appears to have significantly more content, plus it’s integrated with Microsoft Office via another monthly fee.
According to Grok’s statement, the AI will include real-time knowledge from X/Twitter. However, that data rarely includes answers to questions (in terms of overall traffic). Since Musk essentially removed moderators from the network, its accuracy and quality have suffered, while individual safeguards against being unjustly attacked have vanished. That means the X training data is almost certainly tainted.
Grok is amusing, but if you want it to accomplish serious work, it may be ineffective and could land you in hot water if it retrieves unsuitable tweets from a hostile foreign country or someone who does not monitor what they publish.
Interestingly, Musk was one of those who advocated for a pause in AI because he believed the technology was extremely harmful. While I share his concern, an AI educated on Twitter could be the very threat he fears. It’s as if he wants to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by developing an AI that, if trained on a vast number of aggressive, problematic human and bot activities and behaviors, may cause significant harm.
You want an AI to be accurate and honest, which I doubt will be attainable with one trained on tweets because tweets are frequently erroneous or dishonest. If humans make decisions based on this data, or if this data migrates to other training sets, we could end up with a lot of wacky AIs. That won’t be good for any of us.
Conclusion: Grok, for Good or Even worse
Part of me wants to play with Elon Musk’s Grok, but I’m concerned about what it will do and how it will reflect on me. For example, if I ask a genuine question, how do I know it won’t extract content from folks who believe in Q and that everybody who sees my screen won’t think I’m some kind of lunatic?
Still, I appreciate the notion of making one of these devices enjoyable to use, but, like the people who supposedly played with real guns on that film site, this may become far more hazardous over time, putting us at risk.
People say some nasty things about politicians and the inappropriate use of weapons and explosives, and there is a wide variety of hate speech on the platform, any of which showing up on your business laptop could get you fired in a hot moment and even land you in jail, depending on where you work.
Grok, I’m hoping, will be both humorous and good. But I’m afraid it’ll be both funny and horrible, which is the nasty (well, I had to) truth about Elon Musk’s Grok.