There’s also this article from TechCrunch.
Grok 4 seems to consult Elon Musk to answer controversial questions
They tried it out themselves and have reports from other users as well.
Comment on [deleted]
pixxelkick@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Source? This is just some random picture, I’d prefer if stuff like this gets posted and shared with actual proof backing it up.
While this might be true, we should hold ourselves to a standard better than just upvoting what appears to literally just be a random image that anyone could have easily doctored, not even any kind of journalistic article or etc backing it.
Teal@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
BeliefPropagator@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
I found this: simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
TacoEvent@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
It’s possible Grok was fed a massive training set of Elon searches over several more epochs than intended in post training (for search tool use). This could easily lead to this kind of search query output.
pixxelkick@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That’s more like it, thank you!
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended!
Lmao, sure…
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 7 months ago
If the system prompt doesn’t tell it to search for Elon’s views, why is it doing that?
My best guess is that Grok “knows” that it is “Grok 4 buit by xAI”, and it knows that Elon Musk owns xAI, so in circumstances where it’s asked for an opinion the reasoning process often decides to see what Elon thinks.
Yeah, this blogger shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work. LLM behavior is not directly controlled by the system prompt the way this person imagines. For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be “baked in” to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.
My best guess is that the LLM is interfacing with a tool in order to search through tweets, and the training set that demonstrates how to use the tool contains example searches for Elon Musk’s tweets.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 7 months ago
“This blogger” is Simon Willison, who has been doing LLM benchmarks and other LLM-related things since before it was cool
Not a random substack grifter
Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
I can believe it insofar as they might not have explicitly programmed it to do that. I’d imagine they put in something like “Make sure your output aligns with Elon Musk’s opinions.”, “Elon Musk is always objectively correct.”, etc. From there, this would be emergent, but quite predictable behavior.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Yeah the transparency of it might be unintended.
UntitledQuitting@reddthat.com 7 months ago
Thank you, this is far more interesting
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
If it’s an anti-Musk or anti-Trump post on Lemmy, you’re not going to get much proof. But in this case, it looks like someone posted decent souces. From this one posted below:
But in general, just remember that Lemmy is anti-Musk, anti-Trump, and anti-AI and doesn’t need much to jump on the bandwagon.
At least in the past, Grok was one of the more balanced LLMs, so it would be a strange departure for it to suddenly become very biased. So my initial reaction is suspicion that someone is just messing up with it to make Musk and X look bad.
I strongly dislike Musk, but I dislike misinformation even more, regardless of the source.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Weird place to complain about this while you literally post the source (that was already in this thread).