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.

  • Cosmic Cleric
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    219 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 months ago

      The issue is that the process won’t ever stop. It won’t ever be debugged sufficiently

      EDIT: Due to the way it works. A bit like static error in control theory, you know that for different applications it may or may not be acceptable. The “I” in PID-regulators and all that. IIRC

      • @assassin_aragorn
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        19 months ago

        Due to the way it works. A bit like static error in control theory, you know that for different applications it may or may not be acceptable. The “I” in PID-regulators and all that. IIRC

        Oh great, I’m getting horrible flashbacks now to my controls class.

        Another way to look at it is if there’s sufficient lag time between your controlled variable and your observed variable, you will never catch up to your target. You’ll always be chasing your tail with basic feedback control.

      • Cosmic Cleric
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        9 months ago

        It won’t ever be debugged sufficiently

        It will, someday. Probably years and years down the road (pardon the pun), but it will.

        By the way, you reply to me seems very AI-ish. Are you a bot?

          • Cosmic Cleric
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            39 months ago

            No, but English is not my first language

            Fair enough. Apologies.

        • @[email protected]
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          69 months ago

          I guess the argument is that this is what “innovation and disruption” looks like. When they finally iron out so that chatbots won’t invent fake headlines, they will pile on a new technology that endangers us in a new way. This is the acceptable margin of error to them.

    • JackGreenEarth
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      09 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.

      • @anon987
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        -19 months ago

        AI cars already cause drastically less accidents. And the accidents they do cause are overwhelmingly minor.

        • @[email protected]
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          19 months ago

          People hate it when an accident happens and there’s no one to blame. Now it’s still on the driver’s responsibility but that’s not always going to be the case. We’re never reaching zero traffic deaths even with self driving cars that are a hundred times better than the best human driver.