Grok Me Baby One More Time
Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash
India has 800 million Internet users, a limitless appetite for political drama and a fondness for tech toys. It was only a matter of time until they discovered Grok, and the resulting chaos which is no surprise for those familiar with Elon Musk’s recent projects.
An AI With a Purpose
Elon Musk created a fun AI, where free speech rules. Inevitably it’s been trained on the cesspool that is X, and even more inevitably it leaves chaos in its wake.
So, what happened is that one user on X was frustrated with Grok and swore at the chatbot in Hindi. No surprise there, at times we have all forgotten to be polite to our AI overlords. Since Grok has been trained to be a hyper-connected online gremlin, it did the obvious and gave as good as it got.
The chatbot that Musk described as “unfiltered and unhinged” was suddenly everyone’s new best frenemy.
Government Issues
It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. The chatbot quickly became a favorite among critics of Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and effectively became weaponized.
A tsunami of political questions flew in. Grok quickly declared main opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi more honest than Modi, whose interview “often seemed scripted”.
Where many question free speech in India, this moves into something more complex than just referring to trolls. Organizations like Human Rights Watch are concerned, and Future of Free Speech ranked India 24th out of 33 countries in supporting free speech while Modi dismisses these reports.
Using Grok as a competitive tennis ball between the two parties might not be surprising, but when you have an AI not programmed to give politically correct answers people are going to use it for fun and harm in turn.
Some say this is overblown, but I’m not sure.
The Result
Cue the outrage. Cue the applause. This being India the government has been sniffing around like a cat near a milk bowl. Reports suggest India’s IT ministry is already “in touch” with X about Grok’s tone. They’re probably asking if the chatbot can be rebooted with the soul of a 1990s Doordarshan newsreader.
Critics of the ruling party are delighted. Finally, they have a voice that hasn’t been arrested, demonetized, or banned for using too many adjectives. Meanwhile, right-wing warriors have taken to interrogating Grok like it’s an angry teenager caught sneaking in past curfew.
Of course, sensible people (they do exist on X, I’m still on there) and behave in a perfectly normal way. Since AI is only as smart/biased as its training data. Grok isn’t partisan and reflects the chaos it has been born into. So rather than being an agent of change and speaking truth to power, Grok is simply a glorified mirror reflecting the lowest common denominator of online discourse.
Conclusion
In a world where outrage equals engagement, and engagement equals profit, Grok isn’t a chatbot.
It’s a business model.
We had better get used to the real-world effects of this stuff, and fast.