The AI-generated false headline was promoted by X in its official trending news section.

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.

  • darkmogoolEnglish
    74•6 months ago

    “Grok” sounds like a name of a really stupid ork from a D&D capaign.

    • @exprEnglish
      55•6 months ago

      In case you’re not familiar, https://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.

      • @[email protected]English
        19•6 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.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•6 months ago

          Sounds a lot like Cultural appropriation, especially since it is used to market goods and services