Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up.

Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-twitter-ai-chatbot-grok-fake-news-trending-explore

A shocking story was promoted on the “front page” or main feed of Elon Musk’s X on Thursday:

“Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,” read the headline.

This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.

But, there was one major problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.

Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X’s own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X’s trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.

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style99@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People who deploy AI should be held responsible for the slander and defamation the AI causes.

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- TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Slander is spoken. In print, it’s libel.
  
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  - CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Slander is spoken. In print, it’s libel.
    
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  - pwr22@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Get me pictures of Spiderman!
    
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  - Railcar8095@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Why I imagine Xitter lawyers arguing that was it was neither spoken nor “printed”, they can’t be charged?
    
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  - anon987@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You expect people pushing AI fear mongering to be literate?
    
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- QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well if you read OpenAI’s terms of service, there’s an indemnification clause in there.
  
  Basically if you get ChatGPT to say something defaming/libellous and then post it, you would foot the legal bill for any lawsuits that may arise from your screenshot of what their LLM produced.
  
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kadu@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wonder how legislation is going to evolve to handle AI. Brazilian law would punish a newspaper or social media platform claiming that Iran just attacked Israel - this is dangerous information that could affect somebody’s life.

If it were up to me, if your AI hallucinated some dangerous information and provided it to users, you’re personally responsible. I bet if such a law existed, in less than a month all those AI developers would very quickly abandon the “oh no you see it’s impossible to completely avoid hallucinations for you see the math is just too complex tee hee” and would actually fix this.

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- Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I bet if such a law existed in less than a month all those AI developers would very quickly abandon the “oh no you see it’s impossible to completely avoid hallucinations for you see the math is just too complex tee hee” and would actually fix this.
  
  Nah, this problem is actually too hard to solve with LLMs. They don’t have any structure or understanding of what they’re saying so there’s no way to write better guardrails… Unless you build some other system that tries to make sense of what the LLM says, but that approaches the difficulty of just building an intelligent agent in the first place.
  
  So no, if this law came into effect, people would just stop using AI. It’s too cavalier. And imo, they probably should stop for cases like this unless it has direct human oversight of everything coming out of it. Which also, probably just wouldn’t happen.
  
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  - wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yep. To add on, this is exactly what all the “AI haters” (myself included) are going on about when they say stuff like there isn’t any logic or understanding behind LLMs, or when they say they are stochastic parrots.
    
    LLMs are incredibly good at generating text that works grammatically and reads like it was put together by someone knowledgable and confident, but they have no concept of “truth” or reality. They just have a ton of absurdly complicated technical data about how words/phrases/sentences are related to each other on a structural basis. It’s all just really complicated math about how text is put together. It’s absolutely amazing, but it is also literally and technologically impossible for that to spontaneously coelesce into reason/logic/sentience.
    
    Turns out that if you get enough of that data together, it makes a very convincing appearance of logic and reason. But it’s only an appearance.
    
    You can’t duct tape enough speak and spells together to rival the mass of the Sun and have it somehow just become something that outputs a believable human voice.
    
    For an incredibly long time, ChatGPT would fail questions along the lines of “What’s heavier, a pound of feathers or three pounds of steel?” because it had seen the normal variation of the riddle with equal weights so many times. It has no concept of one being smaller than three. It just “knows” the pattern of the “correct” response.
    
    It no longer fails that “trick”, but there’s significant evidence that OpenAI has set up custom handling for that riddle over top of the actual LLM, as it doesn’t take much work to find similar ways to trip it up by using slightly modified versions of classic riddles.
    
    A lot of supporters will counter “Well I just ask it to tell the truth, or tell it that it’s wrong, and it corrects itself”, but I’ve seen plenty of anecdotes in the opposite direction, with ChatGPT insisting that it’s hallucination was fact. It doesn’t have any concept of true or false.
    
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  - kadu@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    So no, if this law came into effect, people would just stop using AI. And imo, they probably should stop for cases like this unless it has direct human oversight of everything coming out of it.
    
    Then you and I agree. If AI can be advertised as a source of information but at the same time can’t provide safeguarded information, then there should not be commercial AI. Build tools to help video editing, remove backgrounds from photos, go nuts, but do not position yourself as a source of information.
    
    Though if fixing AI is at all possible, even if we predict it will only happen after decades of technology improvements, it for sure won’t happen if we are complacent and do not add such legislative restrictions.
    
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  - rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Unless you build some other system that tries to make sense of what the LLM says, but that approaches the difficulty of just building an intelligent agent in the first place.
    
    I actually think an attempt at such an agent would have to include the junk generator. And some logical structure with weights and feedbacks it would form on top of that junk would be something easier for me to call “AI”.
    
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- rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The legislation should work like it would before. It’s not something new, like filesharing in the Internet was.
  
  Which means - punishment.
  
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  - atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The legislation doesn’t work because part of the problem is what “products” these LLM’s are being attached to. We already had this argument in the early and mid oughts in the US. And nothing was done really about the misinformation proliferated on places like Twitter and Facebook specifically because of what they are. Social media sites are protected by section 230 in the US and are not considered news aggregators. That’s the problem.
    
    People can’t seem to agree on whether or not they should be. I think if the platform (not the users) is pushing something as a legitimate news source it shouldn’t be protected by 230 for the purposes of news aggregation. But I don’t know that our laws are even attempting to keep up with new tech like LLM’S.
    
    NY’s for a chatbot that was actively giving out information that was pseudo legal advice. Suggesting that Businesses should do illegal things. They aren’t even taking it down. They aren’t being forced to take it down.
    
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  - melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    But laws don’t punish ownership. Ownership is sacred.
    
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- rayyy@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Another of Musk cutting corners to the max and endangering lives but why should he care? He is in control and that is the only thing that matters to him, even if he loses billions of dollars.
  
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sik0fewl@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
To everyone that goes to “X” to get the “real”, unfiltered news, I hope you can see that it’s not that site anymore.

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- SeedyOne@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yet, annoyingly, much of the press still uses it to disseminate news.
  
  I understand journalism is in a rough spot these days and many are there against their will but something needs to change abruptly. This slow exodus is too slow for democracy to survive '24.
  
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  - rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They could use Nostr. It’s a bit similar to going to a square and yelling. The downside is that you are not heard from every corner of it, but I just remembered of this existing and thought that actually the idea is very nice.
    
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- HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’d argue it never was anything outside of pulling net celebs names from hats and claiming they were rapists and racists without evidence, and then having them get chased off the internet, destroying their careers in the process and in some cases causing suicides… Unless they actually did it, because then they were rich and could just buy good publicity or start an Alt-Right circle jerk where they can claim “Wokeness” did it.
  
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- K0W4LSK1@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It was never that site the FBI was literally using it for narrative control before Elon bought it
  
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- Fedizen@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  it was the “yell at celebrities” website. The whole “buy a blue check” thing destroyed it.
  
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darkmogool@feddit.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“Grok” sounds like a name of a really stupit ork from a D&D capaign.

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- expr@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In case you’re not familiar, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok.
  
  It’s somewhat common slang in hacker culture, which of course Elon is shitting all over as usual. It’s especially ironic since the meaning of the word roughly means “deep or profound understanding”, which their AI has anything but.
  
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- vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Pretty sure its something from a Heilein book namely stranger from a strange world.
  
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- Simulation6@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Gork is from Stranger in a Strange Land.
  
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  - umbraroze@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yup. Got also added to the Jargon File, which was an influential collection of hacker slang.
    
    If there’s one thing that Elon is really good at, it’s taking obscure beloved nerd tidbits and then pigeon-shitting all over them.
    
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- Rubanski@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Grok smash!
  
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cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Oh, what a surprise. Another AI spat out some more bullshit. I can’t wait until companies finally give up on trying to do everything with AI.

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- CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I can’t wait until companies finally give up on trying to do everything with AI.
  
  I don’t think that will ever happen.
  
  They’re acceptable of AI driving car accidents that causes harm happen. It’s all part of the learning / debugging process to them.
  
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  - rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The issue is that the process won’t ever stop. It won’t ever be debugged sufficiently
    
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  - JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    AI isn’t inherently bad. Once AI cars cause less accidents than human drivers (even if they still cause some accidents) it will be moral to use them on roads.
    
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Nobody@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Beware, terminally incompetent interns everywhere. Doing something incredibly damaging to your company over social media on your first day is officially a job that’s been taken by AI.

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BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Something to do with Twitter and Elon was disinformation? I’m keeling over in shock.

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- FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hope his ass goes to court over this.
  
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  - BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I hope he has an aneurysm using a device to enlarge his penis or something.
    
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otter@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t really understand this headline

The bot made it? So why was it promoted as trending?

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- Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s pretty, trending is based on . . . What’s trending by users.
  
  Or as the article explains for those who can’t comprehend what trending means.
  
  Based on our observations, it appears that the topic started trending because of a sudden uptick of blue checkmark accounts (users who pay a monthly subscription to X for Premium features including the verification badge) spamming the same copy-and-paste misinformation about Iran attacking Israel. The curated posts provided by X were full of these verified accounts spreading this fake news alongside an unverified video depicting explosions.
  
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  - Sludgehammer@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Amusingly Grok spat a headline about how police were being deployed to shoot the earthquake after being exposed to a sarcastic tweet. i.imgur.com/qltkEsU.jpeg
    
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  - aceshigh@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Wow. What a world we live in.
    
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therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Grok, worlds smartest orc

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ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Same similiar thing happened with major newspapers about 100 / 150 years ago … governments realized that if any one group or company had control over all the information without regulation, businesses will quickly figure out ways to monetize information for the benefit of those with all the money and power. They then had to figure out how to start regulating newspapers and news media in order to maintain some sort of control and sanity to the entire system.

But like the newspapers of old … no one will do anything about all this until it causes a major crisis or causes a terrible event … or events.

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- rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  By the way, yeah, the LLMs of that time looked like some poor guy writing for pennies articles about astrology or how Redskins are cool but should be exterminated, or inventing fake animals and plants every time.
  
  I’ve sort of mixed L. F. Baum’s biography with Marek from “Good soldier Shveyk”, but many consider Marek to be a portrait of author himself.
  
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unreasonabro@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
#smart

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toxicbubble@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Skynet has begun

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cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not to defend elon here but so what? Is it his job?

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- ChairmanMeow@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  As CEO he is ultimately responsible for his platform. So yes, in the end it’s his responsibility. It’s why he gets paid the big bucks.
  
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  - h3rm17@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Nah, it’s a bit like government. Its only his responsability if it is no one elses responsability. Like, they can have the most corrupt gabinets, most presidents do not resign/abdicate, whatever the word is.
    
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- cygon@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.
  
  So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.
  
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Ginger666@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
MUSK BAD RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE

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- Fedizen@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  “Somebody I don’t like said something bad about one of the worlds richest oligarchs therefore all criticism of him is invalid”
  
  The guy has enough money to protect himself from bad criticism and address narratives he doesn’t like; he doesn’t need sad pathetic losers defending him on the internet like he’s a defenseless baby.
  
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DivergentHarmonics@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Was this some glitch in the matrix, then? (For reference: attack happened on 2024-04-14)

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- 96VXb9ktTjFnRi@feddit.nl ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m wondering the same thing. Is this coincidence?
  
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