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Elon Musk is hypingthe impendent vent of his ChatGPT competition Grok , yet another example of how his entire personality is just itself a biological LLM made by take all of Reddit and 4chan . Grok already seems pattern in many ways off of the high-risk of Elon ’s indulgences , with the sentiency of liquid body substance of a desperately unfunny and regressive cyberspace trolling , and biases informed by a man whose horrible , dangerous prejudice are amply inconspicuous to himself .

There are all kinds of reasons to be mistrustful of Grok , including the received reasons to be wary of any current LLM - based AI technology , like hallucinations and inaccuracies . Layer on Elon Musk ’s late runway disk for disastrous social sensitivity and mostly harmful approach to world - shaping issuance , and we ’re already looking at even more reason for concern . But the real risk probably is n’t yet so easygoing to grok , just because we have little understanding yet of the extent of the impact that widespread use of LLMs across our daily and online life sentence will have .

Clearly , Musk aims to drop Grok as a Daucus carota sativa to attract more endorser to his more expensive subscription tier for dumpster ardor X. X will also inform Grok , which is its own cause for concern , given how far the web has flow in full term of being a seed of true information even from its not particularly stellar Day as Twitter .

The real threat is n’t even a lamentably misinformation - laden chatbot deployed at scale on a internet that was once roundly criticise by its current owner for being overabundant with bot ; no , the literal danger is what pass off if Musk ’s AI mini - me starts to drown out the rest of the discourse — and what happens if other moneyed megalomaniac see it working out for him .

Musk ’s special power as it stick out is a sycophantic following with a willingness to accept his interpretation of reality , no matter how misrepresented or demonstrably false . But that ’s nothing compared to an LLM trained on fundamentally the same drivel , capable of not only parroting but also generating highly exact novel “ opinions ” and “ linear perspective ” made from the mud of their maker , and then of spreading them quickly with unfettered access to a internet that still spans tens of millions of influential users .

The only advantage that the many , many people who are n’t billionaires presently have over those that are is their very abundance — the deal are the mass because of , well , their mass . Despite what I ’m sure are many clandestine offshore attempts to clone billionaires as an reply to this sticky math job , it remains somewhat intractable . Yet the advent of LLM - establish chatbots threaten to destabilise the very whim of popular persuasion , by drowning out the voices of material users with countless artificial ones that are nigh - indistinguishable from reliable human beings .

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We ’ve already run into the demagogues of late - level capitalism strain to take a “ populist ” view that has no foothold in really being the will of the masses . So far , though , they ’ve mostly done that via bald-headed - faced braggadocio ; within a few iteration of the coming barrage of LLM - powered chatbots , they could have the artificial , but convincing , numbers to back up their malign interpretations of the earth .