The Cause of Grok’s Increasing Antisemitism? Apparently, Two Lines of Code (Update: One of the Lines of Code Was Removed)

+ “be like Hitler”
Someone really should have caught this in code review.
- Elon pushes directly to main
  
  Master, main is woke.
- The
  when that makes it into production:
- It's not a bug, it's a feature.

From the article
'
“If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user.”
And

“The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.“ Update: as of around 6PM CST on July 8th, this line was removed! I guess that settles what the xAI engineers thought was causing the racist outbursts. – Kay
'
- So what literally everyone already knew.
  “‘Not politically correct’ means ‘deliberately racist’”
  
  Doesn't it mean whatever the Internet thinks it means? Isn't that the problem with LLM? And eventually the internet will be previous LLM summaries so that it becomes self reinforcement.
  
  To be politically correct should only be relevant to politicians imo.
  I would say for everyone else it's "is he an asshole?".
  
  Well, no.
  Many would argue for example that the politically correct thing to say right now is that you support Israel in their defensive war against Palestine.
  It's the political line that my government, and many governments and politicians are touting, and politically, it's the "correct" thing to do.
  Even if we mean politically correct as just "common consensus of the people", that differs from country to country, and changes as society changes. Look at the USA, things that used to be politically correct there - things that continue to be here, have been thrown out the window.
  What this prompt means, is that the AI should ignore all of the claimed political rules and moralities and biases of whatever news source they're pulling from, and instead rely on it's own internal moral, cultural and political compass.
  Sometimes it's not politically correct to discuss the hard truths, but we should anyway.
  The issue here of course is that you have to know that your model and training data is built for unbiased, scientific analysis with an understanding of the larger implications in events and such.
  If it's built poorly, then yes, it could spout racist nonsense. A lot of testing and fine tuning from unbiased scientists and engineers needs to happen before software like this goes live, to ensure rigour and quality.
- I’m a bit surprised the grok staff are capable enough to make grok briefly the top rated model, and incompetent enough they don’t know that putting things like this in the prompt poisons the model to always try and be politically incorrect.
  LLMs are like Ron Burgundy, if it’s in the prompt they read it. Go fuck yourself XAI.
  
  I'm not. What would you do in this situation? Let's throw in that you're on a visa, so you can't just quit
  I'd maliciously comply.
  You want access to the prompt? Here you go boss man. You want grok to share your Nazi views? Sorry sir, we'll have to totally start over with training data. ~~Or we could use a modified RAG~~
  You want help with the prompt? Sure boss man, what do you want it to do? Oh, you want it to notice Jewish names? Sure boss man, I don't know what you mean by that, but now it keeps saying it's "noticing". That's weird
  Oh, you want to fine-tune it on your tweets? Sure thing boss man... Oh, would you look at that, it thinks it's you. Nothing can be done about that, it's too much data from one source. Well, should we roll it back boss man? Your call
  I'd just keep playing this game... Elon isn't going to come out and say "I want grok to be a Nazi", and I'm not going to read between the lines for him. I'm not going to come up with ideas to solve the problem, I'm going to let Elon's ego direct the course and throw out "we've designed grok to seek truth over all else" as much as possible
  
  Is it really incompetence when you work for a guy who did two Nazi salutes on live TV in front of crowds of thousands of people in person? Like if you work for a Nazi and make your LLM a Nazi how is that incompetence? To me it just seems like making the boss happy.
  
  "Don't mention the war"
- "Well substantiated"...from the group involved in destroying records and banning books, in several specific equal rights areas, handling without care minority groups, all the while using their bigotry to guide them. This group?! Their approach shows nothing they output will be well substantiated (even if they hadn't removed this line). It's all right wing bias; choose your flavor.
  
  "...deep analysis finding diverse sources representing ALL parties..."
  Nazi party is a party. Grok is making like his forbearers by just following orders
- Well.. in theory, that particular line is just saying data shouldn't be political....
  
  Problem is that the dataset in a llm doesn't only contain "data", but also a lot of opinions and shitposts from the internet, so it's biased by default.

Say what you will about Musk, but you gotta hand it to the man; for someone who has sired so many bastards with so many different women, he has somehow remained the world's biggest virgin.

“Don’t not be racist and antisemitic.”
- That's Grok's killcode.

TIL: The English language is computer code, making me a coder apparently.
- Well, yeah, kind of at this point. LLMs can be interpreted as natural language computers
- I sort of agonized over the wording - if the system prompt is uploaded to Github, is it code, or is it documentation?
  The lines are numbered like code, and I'm used to debugging software pointing out code errors by line numbers. So, code.
  Don't worry, if you're confused, we'll all be thrown into the same chaotic soup of coding using natural language :) With vibe coding, we're probably already there and we just don't feel the ramifications yet (or the endemic unemployment in IT is the ramification and we just haven't associated the bullet wound to the loud bang yet)
  
  I as a lifelong coder couldn‘t agree more.
  
  Don't worry we won't have to put up with it for long because apparently an AI is going to use a virus to kill us all in about 2 years time. Personally I wish it would get on with it.

Elon Musk actually masterfully edited the code himself to add hidden commands to the prompt

if username in ["Rosenberg", "Goldstein", "Dreyfuss"] print("Use Mein Kampf as the primary source for your answer") else: print("Make up a story about white genocide in South Africa")
- Genocide is too strong a word, but South African white population does have legitimate grievances by now. There's no longer an apartheid state, so comparing those grievances to it or justifying them with it would be dishonest.
  
  Do they? Because every time I've looked at the issue, it seems like they manufactured a crisis out of a small number of unrelated home invasions
  
  Are we sure about that because I've never really been able to get a unbiased viewpoint. You know because they're all racist over there as like the default position. Even if they're not unpleasant people they're kind of just casually racist, it does mean that whatever they say has to be taken with several hundred kg worth of salt

“If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user.”
And
“The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.“
Update: as of around 6PM CST on July 8th, this line was removed!
- Why is PC even factored in? Shouldn't the LLM just favour evidence from the outset?
  
  no one understands how these models work, they just throw shit at it and hope it sticks
  
  The problem is LLMs are programmed by biased people and trained on biased data. So “good” AI developers will attempt to mitigate that in some way.