Grok's AI CSAM ShitshowSome mainstream reporters, meanwhile, have demonstrated that they do not know or care to know the first thing about by writing articles based on their conversations with Grok as if they can teach us anything. Large language models are not sentient, are not human, do not have thoughts or feelings, and therefore cannot “apologize” or explain how or why any of this is happening. And Grok certainly does not speak for X the company or for Elon Musk. But of course major outlets such as Bari Weiss’s CBS News wrote that Grok “acknowledged ‘lapses in safeguards’ on the platform that allowed users to generate digitally altered, sexualized photos of minors.” The CBS News article notes that Grok said it was “urgently fixing” the problem and that “xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely.” It added that “Grok has independently taken some responsibility for the content,” which is a fully absurd, nonfactual sentence because Grok cannot “independently take some responsibility” for anything, and chatbots cannot and do not know the inner workings of the companies who create them and specifically the humans who manage them. There were dozens of articles explaining that “Grok apologizes,” which, again, is not a thing that Grok can do.
Bleak. Projecting personhood on A.I. is exactly what tech companies want.