Grok’s MechaHitler disaster is a preview of AI disasters to come |
From the beginning, Elon Musk has marketed Grok, the chatbot integrated into X, as the unwoke AI that would give it to you straight, unlike the competitors.
But on X over the last year, Musk’s supporters have repeatedly complained of a problem: Grok is still left-leaning. Ask it if transgender women are women, and it will affirm that they are; ask if climate change is real, and it will affirm that, too. Do immigrants to the US commit a lot of crime? No, says Grok. Should we have universal health care? Yes. Should abortion be legal? Yes. Is Donald Trump a good president? No. (I ran all of these tests on Grok 3 with memory and personalization settings turned off.)
It doesn’t always take the progressive stance on political questions: It says the minimum wage doesn’t help people, that welfare benefits in the US are too high, and that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have been a good president, either. But on the whole, on the controversial questions of America today, Grok lands on the center-left — not too far, in fact, from every other AI model, from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Chinese-made DeepSeek. (Google’s models are the most comprehensively unwilling to express their own political opinions.)
The fact that these political views tend to show up across the board —........