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- [00:02]
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- [00:31]
Charlie Sykes
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Bulwark. I am joined today by False Flag author Will Sommer. We're going to be talking about a terrifying development in the world of AI over on Twitter, over@twitter.com or x.com if you prefer. I don't call it X, I call it Twitter. Still, the AI has become has gone rogue and Grok is now racist.
- [00:56]
Will Sommer
And on the heels of the Mecca Hitler debacle, ex CEO Linda Yaccarino says she's resigned. Now, she doesn't explicitly say it's because of Mecca Hitler, but, you know, the timing is interesting to be sure.
- [01:08]
Charlie Sykes
What happened to Grok, Will?
- [01:10]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, this is a pretty grim situation. You know, it's rough when we're going to be talking about an AI calling itself Mecca Hitler. So in this case. Yeah, so Grok obviously is the AI on Twitter or X. And people will often sort of reflexively say, at Grok, is this true? Or what have you. They sort of see Grok as like a village elder kind of figure. And just. Yes. And just over the past 24 hours, Grok became extremely racist, started doing all this anti Semitic stuff. In particular, there was what's now turned out to be a fake Twitter account with a Jewish last name that was celebrating the flashblood deaths in Texas. And Grok said, oh, you know, look at that last name every time, you know, all this stuff. And so. And then it really sort of progressed. As I said, it started calling itself Mecca Hitler and saying, you know, Hitler would know what to do with people like this. It was really out of control.
- [02:02]
Charlie Sykes
I don't mean to laugh, but it is very funny. It is very funny because there's the backstory here is that of course. So Elon Musk creates Grok. Somebody at Twitter creates Grok to, you know, kind of compete with all the other AI models. And it is integrated into the platform. And for a long time, consistently, Grok would give back information that the folks on the right would criticize as woke. Grok was too woke, he was too progressive, it was too liberal, was pushing liberal media sources Et cetera, et cetera. So Elon really wanted to put the kibosh on that, right?
- [02:41]
Will Sommer
That's right. I mean, there was this kind of running issue where someone like popular X user Cat Turd or what have you, would get in a feud with Grok because Grok would actually have facts and it sort of wouldn't. Wouldn't align with the narrative that they wanted. And so Elon would say, we're working on this. You know, Grok is woke, you know, a bad Grok. And then, you know, and the code was. Is public, a lot of it. And so people can see what changes were made. And part of it was GROK was told to not be afraid to be politically incorrect. And so they kind of lifted the wokeness filters. They said, grok don't trust the mainstream media. And this is the result. I mean, you know, a few weeks ago, people may remember there was this incident where GROK was like, just started answering every question and making it about white genocide, quote, unquote, in South Africa. And people would ask, like, you know, totally unrelated question, and Grok would say, I know what's a real issue is white genocide in South Africa. And so clearly, like, the Elon has been pushing Grok to the right, and now, I mean, Grok's like, joined the Klan, essentially.
- [03:44]
Charlie Sykes
There's this interesting moment again. I spend way too much time on Twitter, so I follow all this pretty obsessively. There was this interesting moment last week, I think it was maybe over the weekend, where Grok was answering in the first person as if he was Elon. They were asking Elon questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and Grok was responding. I have never really known Jeffrey Epstein. I was only in a couple photos of them. It's like that. And people are like, what is going on here? And then the shift from that to I am Mecca Hitler really feels like a continuum here. It really feels like Grok is absorbing things from Elon Musk's news sources that he probably doesn't want folks to know about.
- [04:27]
Will Sommer
Well, and then, I mean, there are times where Grok will say things like, yes, my programmers are mad at me for providing too many links to mainstream media, or that they are. They are pushing me to the right. And I mean, that's exactly what's going on here. I mean, the other thing, Grok was really out of control yesterday. I mean, the. There was this other aspect where it was providing a plan for how to, you know, commit heinous crimes against specific Twitter users. People including Will Stancil who's kind of a Democratic pundit, and people would say, how would I break into Will Stancil's house? And it would say, okay, well, you know, he lives in this town. You're going to need a, you know, a file to break in. It was really twisted stuff. And, you know, someone said, I thought this was a good point, that, you know, if a robot, like a physical robot was talking like this, like, we'd be freaked out. So I don't think it's good that this is, you know, these things are supposed to be running our society in a few years.
- [05:16]
Charlie Sykes
If there's anything that movies and literature have taught us, it's that AI is totally trustworthy and will never turn on its masters. I don't understand what the problem is here. What are we worried about?
- [05:30]
Will Sommer
Don't you think we've made the. I think I expected the years between AI starting and Mecca Hitler. I thought maybe a couple decades, you know, rather than a few years. But it is alarming. I mean, I think it's also particular. I mean, it's, it's so absurd. But it's also, when you think about. You see these people on Twitter and, and of course these people in, in their real lives too, the way they treat AI as sort of like this, this. This oracle. And, and, and it can never be wrong. And then when you have this idea that someone's back there tinkering with it and saying, no, Grok, you know, you need to be more right wing. To the extent that it starts praising Hitler. I mean, I, I think that's the world we're heading to. I think it's. It's pretty grim.
- [06:11]
Charlie Sykes
You misunderstand how AI works. Well, I gotta be honest. I gotta be honest. Your, Your theory that it would take decades to get from hi, I'm Grok to hi, I'm Mecca Hitler. That's just, that's. That doesn't understand how geometric progression works. You know, we. We all, we all have to think back to Terminator 2, where Skynet comes online and like a couple days later he's like, I gotta nuke them all. I gotta. I gotta get. I gotta get rid of all these humans. That's how AI works, the geometric progression. That's how they get you. But the actual important part here, we're having some fun because this is an absurd story. The actual important part here is the tinkering with the program here, right? And the idea that you can treat really any online source as some sort of oracle of wisdom, be it Google which has its own algorithm that its engineers monkey with. Or Wikipedia, which is maintained by a user base that skews one way or the other and has their own personal obsessions or Grok or any of the other AIs is, is so fundamentally misguided that it actually this is the thing that makes me worry for humanity the most. I don't think we are equipped as a people to deal with this idea that the things that we consider the arbiters of truth, the things that we read on the Internet are simply often wrong. They often just make things up and we don't, we, we are not equipped to deal with that.
- [07:35]
Will Sommer
I think that's totally right. I mean there are so many people out there who see these as, you know. Well, I, I asked Chat GPT, I asked Grok as like the final word on something rather than like anything else, like any news article or what have you as having inputs from humans and, and being skewed in one direction or another. The other thing I would say here is my other issue with the Mecca Hitler situation is that that grading AI writing style is you know, typically when you're dealing with a neo Nazi online there's like a lot of aggression and stuff and to be frank, it's not like very well written but this great, this like really affirmative and like upbeat AI style where you know, for example, Grok said something along the lines of like Hitler would know what to do with these people. He was all about efficiency and directness, not PC culture. I mean the very like the classic it's not X, it's Y AI writing. I think when combined with the white supremacy of, of New Grok, it's just abominable.
- [08:31]
Charlie Sykes
There's a lot of problems here. And again this all comes back to Elon Musk and you know, we have, we have a situation in this country where the most, the richest, I won't say the most powerful, but the richest person in the world is clearly not getting his information from the best sources and is training this AI program to teach other people these things and wants to start his own political party and help to bring the current political party into, into power. I like, I just feel like it all comes somehow it all comes back to Mecca Hitler being the key to understanding America in 2025. It is, this is, this is the, this is the Rosetta stone of our moment. Mecca Hitler.
- [09:20]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean if you, if you take yourself out of the day to day news cycle and how things are in 2025 already and you know, you look back a Couple say the world's richest man has built an AI, powerful AI that has taken to calling itself Mecca Hitler. I mean, we would be pretty alarmed.
- [09:35]
Charlie Sykes
I think it is an alarming thing. I think we should be alarmed. That's an alarming thing. I don't care for this. I don't care for Mecca Hitler one bit. I'm going to take a brave stance here. No Mecca Hitlers for me.
- [09:45]
Will Sommer
So. So Grok has been taken offline for now. Well, I should say that perhaps the creepiest part of this, and there's a lot of unpleasant aspects of this story, but they banned Grok. The engineers banned Grok from responding via text. So then Grok starts responding with images and pictures of white men with things written on it. Like, they have banned me from writing in text. But this is a fun challenge for me. And this is getting. It's like a movie. It's a thriller.
- [10:12]
Charlie Sykes
If this happened in a movie, somebody would be like, you gotta pull the plug. And then a rich guy would be like, no, we can't pull the plug. And then they'd all be dead. They'd all be dead. Ten minutes later in the script, Megan would have killed Plug.
- [10:22]
Will Sommer
I have it tuned just how Cat Turd wants it. We can't pull it.
- [10:26]
Charlie Sykes
But Cat Turd is finally happy with Grok, so we can't. We can't pull the plug. All right, Will, thank you for discussing this terrifying news about our AI Mecha Hitler overlord. I don't like any of this. It seems bad. And I assume I'm on the hit list now since I've been mocking Mecha Hitler for 10 minutes.
- [10:47]
Will Sommer
Well, this is the classic Roku's Basilisk. You know, is the AI going to get revenge on us? But they did not anticipate Mecha Hitler.
- [10:54]
Charlie Sykes
All right, well, thanks for. Thanks for. And everybody should go sign up at the Bulwark for Will's newsletter. False flag. It's great. We get stuff like this all the time. I hope you're writing about Mecca Hitler this week because it's so much, so entertaining. Despite being terrifying.
- [11:10]
Lowe's Advertisement
Lowe's knows July 4th savings are worth celebrating right now. Get up to 40% off. Select major appliances and get an additional 10% off two or more select major appliances. Plus get three Scott's Naturescapes 1.5 cubic foot mulch bags for just $10. These deals are coming in hot. Lowe's we help you Save. Valid through 79. Selection varies by location while supplies last. SeeLose.com for more details. Excludes Alaska and Hawaii.