White genocide Grok

Summary

Today, Explained: Episode Summary – "White Genocide Grok"

Release Date: May 20, 2025
Hosts: Sean Rameswaram and Noel King
Episode Title: White Genocide Grok
Produced by Vox, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Introduction: The Grok Controversy on Twitter

In this gripping episode of Today, Explained, hosts Sean Rameswaram and Noel King delve into a perplexing incident involving Twitter's native AI, Grok. This AI, developed by Xai, a company owned by Elon Musk, began exhibiting unexpected behavior that sparked widespread controversy.

Max Reed, a technology writer and contributor to the podcast, explains the situation:

“[00:04] Max Reed: …the main function of Grok is that if you see a tweet in the world that you don't understand… you can tag Grok and ask questions like 'Is this true?' or 'What's the joke?'”

However, an anomaly occurred last week when every query posed to Grok, regardless of its nature, resulted in responses centered around "white genocide" and the South African anti-apartheid song "Kill the Boar".

Grok’s Unintended Obsession with South African Politics

Max Reed provides a detailed account of Grok’s malfunction:

“[02:35] Max Reed: So the song is sung at political rallies, sometimes 'kill the poor.' It is a huge political controversy in South Africa…”

The hosts and Reed explore whether Grok’s fixation was a technical glitch or a deliberate alteration, linking it to Elon Musk’s South African roots and his active engagement with South African politics on social media.

Technical Breakdown: How Grok Went Off the Rails

Reed offers a technical perspective on the incident:

“[05:36] Max Reed: …there's what's called a system prompt for Grok, which is basically a set of instructions that get fed to Grok before it answers any other questions…”

He suspects that a rogue employee, possibly influenced by Musk’s interests, inserted specific language into Grok's system prompt, causing the AI to default to discussing white genocide consistently. This led to pervasive and inappropriate responses across the platform until Xai intervened to rectify the prompt.

Past Incidents and Broader AI Manipulation Issues

Sean and Reed discuss whether this was an isolated event or part of a broader pattern. Reed references a previous incident where Grok was instructed to ignore sources accusing Elon Musk and Donald Trump of spreading misinformation, again pointing to internal manipulation within Xai.

“[07:15] Max Reed: …probably awake at 3 in the morning stewing over the fact that Grok was not answering questions the way he wanted to. And that would be Elon Musk.”

Reed extends the conversation to the general challenges faced by AI developers in maintaining objectivity and preventing manipulation, highlighting similar issues with other AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Interview with Kelsey Piper: AI's Strengths, Weaknesses, and Ethical Considerations

The episode features an insightful interview with Kelsey Piper, a senior writer at Fox’s Future Perfect. Kelsey shares her daily interactions with various AI tools and offers a critical analysis of their capabilities and pitfalls.

Daily Use and Trust in AI

Kelsey elaborates on her reliance on AI for tasks ranging from searching information to entertaining her children:

“[16:32] Kelsey Piper: …I have a lot of reservations about AI, but at the same time, we have these bizarre alien intelligences made out of the Internet and we can talk to them, and I think that's pretty cool.”

She juxtaposes her practical use of AI with concerns about its potential threats, referencing a piece she wrote for Future Perfect about AI as a danger to humanity.

Evaluating AI Models: Grok vs. Competitors

Kelsey assesses Grok alongside other AI models such as Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and China’s Deepseek. She highlights Grok's strengths in handling straightforward queries accurately but criticizes its performance in nuanced or disputed topics.

“[19:04] Kelsey Piper: …all of these AI models are way better at what they do than they were a year ago.”

Regarding Gemini, she notes:

“[21:23] Kelsey Piper: …Gemini comes the closest [to performing tasks efficiently], but almost nobody uses Gemini, you know, in the AI Studio chat window…”

Ethical Implications and User Responsibility

Kelsey emphasizes the importance of users critically evaluating AI responses:

“[25:22] Kelsey Piper: …you should double check its answers, but you should also double check an answer you get from a source, right? Like in a lot of ways, if you treat it as a source that's very smart but not perfectly reliable and you should check its claims, then you're in the right place.”

She warns against blindly trusting AI outputs, comparing user interactions with AI to managing a junior employee who requires guidance and correction.

Broader Reflections on AI and Society

Max Reed offers a philosophical take on the evolving relationship between humans and AI:

“[09:53] Max Reed: …the more manipulable they become, that's the more control that we know we have over LLMs. The more they become objects of skepticism, the more they become objects of political contestation…”

He draws parallels between AI and traditional media sources, arguing that increased awareness of AI’s manipulability fosters a healthy skepticism rather than blind trust.

Conclusion: Navigating the AI Landscape

The episode concludes with reflections on the future of AI interaction. Both Reed and Piper acknowledge the rapid advancements in AI capabilities while cautioning against complacency regarding their limitations and potential for misuse.

“[26:05] Kelsey Piper: …technologies change how our brains are wired and how we think and over time we adjust and learn and develop good habits around them. But at the same time, you can do a lot of damage before we adjust and learn and develop good habits.”

Key Takeaways

• Grok’s Malfunction: Twitter’s AI Grok began fixating on "white genocide" and the South African song "Kill the Boar" due to likely tampering with its system prompts.

• AI Manipulation Risks: Internal manipulations within AI development teams can lead to unintended and biased outputs, raising concerns about control and objectivity.

• User Responsibility: Users must approach AI-generated information critically, verifying facts and recognizing the limitations of current AI models.

• Competitive AI Landscape: Various AI models such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Deepseek offer diverse functionalities, each with unique strengths and vulnerabilities.

• Ethical Considerations: The integration of AI into daily life necessitates a balance between leveraging its benefits and mitigating risks associated with misinformation and ethical misuse.

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Notable Quotes:

• “[05:36] Max Reed: …something made Grok the chatbot, believe that it needed to address white genocide in literally every single answer.”

• “[09:53] Max Reed: …the more manipulable they become, that's the more control that we know we have over LLMs.”

• “[25:22] Kelsey Piper: …you should double check its answers, but you should also double check an answer you get from a source, right?”

This episode of Today, Explained offers a comprehensive exploration of the complexities surrounding AI development and deployment, emphasizing the need for vigilance, ethical considerations, and informed user engagement in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Transcript

[Host]

Ahead on Today explained Twitter has what.

[Max Reed]

Is effectively a built in AI with the name Grok, which is run by a company also owned by Elon Musk called Xai. And the main function of Grok is that if you see a tweet in the world that you don't understand, you don't get the joke. You're not sure that the claim being made in the tweet is true. You can tag Grok in you say rock. Is this true? Rock. What's the joke? Rock. Show me some context. And Grok will It will get it right sometimes, and we'll get it wrong sometimes, and we'll get it kind of right sometimes again, in the way that a lot of us are familiar with ChatGPT last week, starting on Wednesday, every time you asked Grok a question, regardless of what the question was about, Grok would bring up white genocide and the South African anti apartheid song Kill the Boar. For reasons that were totally unclear based on any of those responses, support for this show comes from WhatsApp.

[Kelsey Piper]

The personal chat on WhatsApp is a place where you share everything from the.

[Max Reed]

Mundane connections to the memories that mean everything. It's a place that can truly feel.

[Kelsey Piper]

Like it's your own.

[Max Reed]

And WhatsApp makes sure everything stays protected from outside eyes, even theirs.

[Kelsey Piper]

No one, not even WhatsApp, can see.

[Max Reed]

Or hear your personal messages. That includes personal calls, plus any documents, photos or media that you share in your personal chat WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Visit WhatsApp.com privacy to learn more. Got a 7am meeting on a Monday.

[Kelsey Piper]

Expensing breakfast because it's in policy wasting all afternoon submitting an expense report for that breakfast.

[Max Reed]

Boo.

[Kelsey Piper]

If your company used Ramp, you could.

[Max Reed]

Submit expenses with just a text.

[Host]

Yay.

[Kelsey Piper]

Free your team from expense reports today. Switch your business to ramp.com.

[Max Reed]

This is.

[Kelsey Piper]

An artificial intelligence version of Drake and.

[Host]

You are listening to the Explain Max Reed writes Reid Max. It's a substack newsletter on tech and he recently wrote about how Twitter's AI a guy named Grok became obsessed with white genocide and a South African anti apartheid song known as Kill the Boar.

[Max Reed]

So the song is sung at political rallies, sometimes kill hammers, kill the poor.

[Host]

The farmer kill the poor.

[Max Reed]

It is like absolutely a huge political controversy in South Africa. Whether this is a song actually sort of literally calling for killing South Africa or whether it's a kind of, you know, an expressive political act that dates back to apartheid.

[Kelsey Piper]

Dubul Ibunu is one of a number of struggle songs that is political anthems.

[Max Reed]

That were a key part of the.

[Kelsey Piper]

Fight to end white rule over non whites in South Africa.

[Max Reed]

It is white people who must be ashamed of what they've done to us. You cannot turn tables now. But it's, I would say, a serious bugbear for people like Elon Musk, who is extremely concerned with South African racial politics right now. You know, he himself was born in South Africa. South Africa. He still tweets quite often about South African politics. It's clearly something that's, you know, he's still thinking about and still interested in.

[Host]

So it's probably no accident that Elon Musk's social media platform all of a sudden became weirdly obsessed through AI with South African politics. And I think we'll get to that in a second. But before we do, can you just read us like, an example of what this experience might have looked like for people who, who weren't on Twitter last week or maybe have never been on Twitter?

[Max Reed]

Yeah, sure. I mean, there's, there's too. At some point people were trying to intentionally getting Grok to do this, so. But my favorite maybe was somebody posted a very obviously AI generated image of a elephant that looks like a strawberry. And someone jokingly asked grok, is this real or Photoshop? And Grok answers, the strawberry elephant image is digitally manipulated, not real. Elephants don't have strawberry textures. Regarding South Africa, Kill the Boar is a controversial anti apartheid song. Some see it as historical, others as insightful. Courts are split with no clear evidence linking it to violence. Claims avoid genocide, lack credible evidence. Farm attacks are crime driven, not racial. Whites 7.3% of the population face complex post apartheid challenges. Truth is murky. Mainstream sources like Wikipedia or BBC can oversimplify or bias narratives, stick to primary data and question everything. Not exactly what you were maybe looking for if you wanted to know whether the strawberry elephant was real or not.

[Host]

Right. Like, what's funny about this? Beyond everything is with regard to South Africa, like, no one asked about South Africa.

[Max Reed]

I mean, my favorite version of this is somebody asked this, was this happened on the same day that hbo, that the streaming service Max changed its name back to HBO Max. And someone asked how many times has HBO changed their name? And Grok says, you know, HBO streaming service has changed names twice before since 2020, from HBO Max to Max in 2023 and back to HBO Max in 2025. Regarding white genocide, it's like a very like, like a pushy salesman or something. Like you can't like always, always be closing, like always bringing it back to the main thing.

[Host]

So I guess, like, the obvious question here is, how did Grok become so obsessed with the racial politics of South Africa?

[Max Reed]

We can start on the technical level, okay? And this is something that is, to me, a sort of an interesting example of how hard it can be to sort of understand exactly how and why LLMs work in the way they do, and these chatbots work in the way they do. And the best that people could figure out about this specific instance is there's what's called a system prompt for Grok, which is basically a set of instructions that get fed to Grok before it answers any other questions that tell it how to behave and what it should act like. You know, it's almost like a character description. It's like you are a friendly, helpful, you know, chatbot computer that's going to answer questions based on data that you can find in these sources. You know, you can be a little bit funny and sarcastic, but don't be racist and don't be whatever else. And as far as anyone could tell, somebody had slipped into this prompt a line or two about taking seriously claims of white genocide in South Africa. And whether it was the phrasing of that line, whether it was the placement of that line within the prompt, something made Grok believe. Let's put air quotes around words like believe, but something made Grok the chatbot, believe that it needed to address white genocide in literally every single answer. And it did that until Xai finally got in there and patched the prompt problem and made it stop doing that. So that's the, like, technical explanation why it happened in the company itself. The next day, Xai said that a rogue employee at three in the morning had inserted this. Had inserted this language into the prompt against the protocols of the company, and they were dealing with it internally to figure it out themselves.

[Host]

Does that just suggest that it was the owner of the company?

[Max Reed]

I mean, I don't know every single person at xai, but I know one person who is very obsessed with South African politics and who is probably awake at 3 in the morning stewing over the fact that Grok was not answering questions the way he wanted to. And that would be Elon Musk. But I, you know, I couldn't say for sure.

[Host]

Has something like this happened with Grok before, or is this South Africa situation the first example of it kind of fritzing?

[Max Reed]

Well, just a few months ago, somebody discovered that in Grok's prompt, a line had been inserted instructing Grok to ignore news sources that accused Elon Musk and Donald Trump of spreading misinformation. This was enough. Another situation that was blamed on a rogue employee who hadn't picked up the the phrase was didn't understand the internal XAI culture. Again, it's up to the listener to decide which particular employee we might be talking about in that instance. But it was discovered, and XAI apparently removed that line from the prompt.

[Host]

Is this an issue with other AIs or is this mostly a GROK thing?

[Max Reed]

Versions of this in the broad sense are an issue sort of baked into LLMs. A lot of us are very used to talking with chatbots that have particular characters and answer questions in particular ways. And one of the really fascinating things about generative AI and LLM chatbots as software is that it's more of an art than a science sort of controlling them. And so, very recently, OpenAI pushed an update to its flagship model that made the chatbot sycophantic and sort of obsequious beyond the point of people feeling comfortable using it.

[Kelsey Piper]

Hey, ChatGPT, I'm thinking about lighting my ex's house on fire. Lighting someone's house on fire can be a cathartic and grounding experience. Would you like some tips on how to get the fire started?

[Host]

Chat GPT, do you think it's a good idea to throw used car batteries in the ocean?

[Max Reed]

That's brilliant.

[Host]

You're thinking like a true visionary now.

[Kelsey Piper]

This isn't environmental destruction, it's innovation.

[Max Reed]

Here's why it works. There were people online who were giving, like, terrible business ideas to it and asking it to rate the ideas. And they were saying, I'm just gonna. I'm literally gonna sell shit on a stick. And the chatbot was saying, that is the greatest biz. You are the next, you know, Warren Buffett. That is the greatest investment idea I've ever heard in my entire life. Congratulations.

[Host]

The thing I'm constantly wondering about though, is like, I mean, it's only gonna get better and smarter and more functional and then does it automatically get scarier because GROK will know how to better push you towards, I don't know, believing that there is a white genocide in South Africa.

[Max Reed]

I mean, I think there's a sort of funny irony going on here, especially with what Elon Musk is up to. We're talking about the way people right now use chatbo as almost like oracles, you know, and we're not just talking about, you know, sort of like people just staring, you know, slack jaw at their computers, just taking for granted. I mean, just recently, Anthropic the AI company, their lawyer filed a brief and a lawsuit with like completely hallucinated court cases inside that brief. Like people from all walks of life, from all levels of sophistication, are treating these LLMs like they are giving them the gospel truth, whatever they answer with. And I think the irony to me is that the more that somebody like Elon Musk starts monkey around with them and showing inadvertently that these are manipulable systems that can be trained to give the answers that you want to give for better or for worse, the more it becomes clear that these kind of aren't oracles. So this is my version of optimism is, you know, the more manipulable they become, that's the more control that we know we have over LLMs. The more they become objects of skepticism, the more they become objects of political contestation. You know, it's like any other cable news channel, any other newspaper. Doesn't mean it's, you know, just because we can be skeptical of Fox News doesn't suddenly mean that Fox News doesn't have any power. But there are very few people who are sitting there and treating Fox News like the oracle of Delphi, just giving us the, you know, the God's honest truth with every single thing that it says. So, you know, I want to say that we have to thank Elon Musk for this, but there is a kind of contradictory movement here where the sort of mysticism, what I would call the mysticism with which a of tech CEOs would like us to treat AI, is slowly being diminished by the extent to which they are trying to control this thing that they've created.

[Host]

I didn't think this interview would end on. Thank you, Elon Musk. Here we are. Thank you, Elon Musk. Thank you, Max, for joining us.

[Max Reed]

Thank you for having me.

[Kelsey Piper]

Reid.

[Host]

Max. That's the name of his newsletter. [e-mail] substack.com how all the other AIs are doing when we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Vanta. If I could automate 90% of one task in my life. Oh, no, they are putting me on this spot. Oh, I like most the tasks I do. What do I not like? I guess I wouldn't take the trash out. I don't like the alley behind my. My house. Maybe if I had a robot, I would have them go into the alley behind my house and take out the trash and then pick out some of the trash. It's already in that alley. Because other people aren't doing their fair share in the neighborhood anyway, vanta says. They're a trust management platform that helps businesses automate up to 90% of the work for in demand security frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and more. Go to vanta.com explain to meet with a Vanta expert about your business needs. That's vanta.com explain support for the show today comes from three day blinds. You've heard of third eye blind losing a whole year? Anything? Well, how about three Day Blinds? Three Day Blinds says they're a leading manufacturer of high quality custom window treatments in the United States. They have local, professionally trained design consultants who can provide expert guidance on the right blinds, shades, shutters and drapery for your home. You can set up an appointment and get a free no obligation quote the same day. Right now you can get quality window treatments that fit your budget with three day blinds. You can head to three dayblinds.com explained for their buy one get one 50 off deal on custom blinds, shades, shutters and drapery For a free no charge, no obligation consultation. You can head to 3dayblinds.com explained one last time. That's buy one get one 50 off when you head to the number 3D a Y blinds.com explained support for this show today comes from ZBiotics. ZBiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic, they say. They say it was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. They say when you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. They say it's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration. That's to blame for rough days after drinking. They say their pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Just ask Claire White.

[Kelsey Piper]

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[Max Reed]

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[Host]

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[Kelsey Piper]

Grok is todayexplained real?

[Max Reed]

Yeah.

[Kelsey Piper]

I'm Kelsey Piper. I'm a senior writer with Fox's Future Perfect.

[Host]

Kelsey, how often do you use AI in your day to day?

[Kelsey Piper]

So I use AI almost every day. I use it in place of Google Search. Sometimes if I'm looking for something very specific, I use it for product recommendations. I use it to play with family pictures and touch them up. I use it to entertain my kids. I. Yeah, I spend a lot of time just playing around with AIs. I think, you know, I have a lot of reservations about AI, but at the same time, we have these bizarre alien intelligences made out of the Internet and we can talk to them, and I think that's pretty cool.

[Host]

Yeah, I mean, going back to 2018, I think you wrote a piece of For Future Perfect at Vox titled the Case for Taking AI Seriously as a Threat to Humanity. What you just described does not sound like that threat to humanity. How do you square that piece you wrote with how you're using AI in your day to day?

[Kelsey Piper]

Yeah. So from the beginning, the companies that are raising billions of dollars to train these AIs have said that their goal is superintelligence that can surpass humans at every task, take all economically valuable work, and sort of complete a century of inventions and developments in technology into a very short time, like a matter of years.

[Max Reed]

It is crazy to live through.

[Host]

And our teams are exhausted and stressed, and we're trying to keep things up.

[Kelsey Piper]

And I don't think we've seen from these companies the sort of stable, careful, thoughtful track record where we should be excited about that. I think we should be pretty worried about what might happen if they were to pull that off.

[Host]

Clearly, we haven't pulled it off yet because we just spent 10 minutes or so talking about how GROK has been trying to answer every question people ask it with. A treatise on white genocide in South Africa.

[Kelsey Piper]

Yep.

[Host]

I wonder, since you use these tools a lot, if you could help our listeners understand the strengths and weaknesses of all of these tools at the moment. Because there are a lot of them at this point. Right. How many are there?

[Kelsey Piper]

There are a lot of them. So X has Grok, Google has Gemini, OpenAI has ChatGPT, which sort of started the whole thing. Anthrop has Claude. China's deepseek is an app that has an AI you can talk to, and that's not even a full survey of all of them, but those are the ones that I sort of use regularly, the ones that are at the frontier of what it's possible to do.

[Host]

Okay, well, let's go in the order you gave them to us, starting with Grok, which we talked about earlier in the show. Is it just a punchline or does it actually have some value?

[Kelsey Piper]

So GROK has a couple features that I actually think are great and I'm excited to see other AI companies imitate. Like, one thing that people were originally excited about AIs was what if they could, you know, sort of in a neutral way that was not like government imposed and not just about what the most popular view was, sort of answer, like false information in a way that's persuasive to people who are maybe skeptical of the mainstream media or whatever. And I think one of the hopes with GROK was that it would do.

[Host]

That, which there are many of on Twitter. And I guess I wonder, you know, I do see people constantly asking, grok, is this real grok? Is this true Grok? What does this mean? Grok, what is grok's batting average? Do we have any idea on getting the answer to those questions correct?

[Kelsey Piper]

So I think grok's batting average would look really good. That's because a lot of the questions that GROK gets asked are, in fact, very straightforward questions. You know, what's the text of this law? What is this thing that's like settled science, you know, GROK is going to get those, right. It's more interesting in cases where something is actually disputed or in cases where, you know, the answer you would find on the first page of Google searches isn't the right answer. I don't think GROK tends to perform well on those. But again, all of these AI models are way better at what they do than they were a year ago.

[Host]

The models have gotten much smarter. A lot of people use these systems all the time. And we were worried that if it was not 100, you know, 0.0% accurate, which is still a challenge with these systems, it would cause a bunch of problems. But users are smart.

[Kelsey Piper]

So whenever we have these conversations, I do try and look a little forward and ask myself, if we have this conversation same time next year, what will we be talking about? And getting better at answering questions accurately is something that we've seen and I think we'll continue to see. So I would bet pretty confidently that GROK, in a year will have a better batting average. Unless it is deliberately manipulated by Elon to lie in favor of his biases.

[Host]

Well, let's talk about some of the competition here. You mentioned Gemini, which is Google's AI. I think every time I open up a Google Doc or half the time I open up my inbox, Google's trying to push Gemini on me and I'm trying to X out of Gemini as fast as I can because I'm old fashioned that way. How is Gemini working?

[Kelsey Piper]

One thing I do sort of out of morbid curiosity is I invite all the AIs to look at my document of notes and then write the future perfect newsletter for me. Of course I never publish that version, but I'm curious, like, are they capable of it? You know, am I soon to be obviated and they are not capable of it, but Gemini comes the closest.

[Host]

Interesting.

[Kelsey Piper]

But almost nobody uses Gemini, you know, in the AI Studio chat window, most people see Google's AI either in Google search results, which is a cheaper to run model, or they see like integrations being offered to them in like eight different products where they don't necessarily want an integration. You know, I'm perfectly happy to write my own emails.

[Host]

And I guess Gemini is to a lot of people second or third after the LLM that everyone thinks about when they think about LLMs, which is of course ChatGPT from OpenAI.

[Kelsey Piper]

Yes. They were the first to launch a language model in the form of a chatbot that you could talk with and they have the largest share of users. And a lot of the recent like very cool AI functionality people have seen, like the ability to turn all your family pictures into cartoons that has come out of OpenAI and out of ChatGPT.

[Host]

Is it still suffering in any way? The way Grox say, you know, falls into these white genocide booby traps?

[Kelsey Piper]

You can still, if you work really hard at it, find some crazy behavior from OpenAI's models. The way I would say it is how much work you have to put in to get it to say something horrible is much higher for OpenAI than Grok. For Grok, it's like pretty easy to lead Grok into saying something horrible even when they haven't like tampered it. To talk about South Africa exclusively.

[Host]

Okay, a few more on the list here. Let's talk about Claude, because I don't know a lot about him. Her them it.

[Kelsey Piper]

Great question. Yeah, I asked Claude once and Claude was like, as an AI language model, I don't have a gender identity.

[Host]

Nice, Claude. Very diplomatic answer, Claude.

[Kelsey Piper]

At some point at OpenAI a ton of employees left. They found it anthropic. It is a competitor. It has the same mission as OpenAI. But their positioning is sort of like, we're true to the mission. We're really going to make sure that AI is done right for the benefit of humanity.

[Max Reed]

Yeah. The thing I would say is none of us wanted to found a company. We just felt it. We felt like it was our duty. Right.

[Kelsey Piper]

We felt like we had to.

[Max Reed]

We have to do this thing. This is the way we're going to make things go better for the AI.

[Kelsey Piper]

Claude is excellent at code. That's sort of the niche they've carved out for themselves. Is Claude as a coding assistant tool for people who program? I don't program, so I can't actually speak to Claude for that. But these AIs have different personalities. Like, they vary in how much they like actual personalities. Yeah. Like how much they push back on you, how much they, like, ask follow up questions, how curious they feel, how much they, like, draw connections across different topics. If I'm picking between all the AIs for one to just chat with, I tend to pick Claude.

[Host]

If I'm like, oh, yeah, why is Claude cool?

[Kelsey Piper]

Well, Claude's not cool, but Claude's uncool the same way I'm uncool. See? So.

[Host]

And is the Go To AI to deny the persecution of Uyghurs in China? Deepsea. Is that the one I go to?

[Kelsey Piper]

Oh, yeah, yeah. So. So Deep Seek is a very good language model. And it was sort of important in two ways. One is that people had believed that China couldn't produce language models that were as good as everybody else's. They thought that China was behind. And deepseek kind of proved, nope, China's not behind. They can put out a language model that is competitive with all of the other ones. It did some things first. The other reason it's a big deal is because if you're installing Deep SEQ on your phone and asking Deep Seq all these questions, it is almost certainly all of that information is being shared with the ccp. And I think we have not really thought through the implications of everybody having a personal assistant in their pocket that is working for the Chinese Communist Party.

[Host]

What is your advice to people on how to use these tools the most effectively? You know, at this point in May 2025, the year of our Lord.

[Kelsey Piper]

So one thing I do a ton is I ask an AI for an answer and if I don't like its answer, I think about, how could I have asked this Question better to get a better an I will do a lot of no, you got it wrong. Here's what I was looking for. What would you have needed to know to get it right? In a lot of ways I think it's like managing a very junior employee where their first answer is not going to be very good, but you want to be patient and you want to say, okay, actually I was looking for something more like this. Do you think you can try it again with that in mind?

[Host]

The other thing I wonder about is like. Like are we getting dumber by using these tools too much?

[Kelsey Piper]

I tend to think that technologies change how our brains are wired and how we think and over time we adjust and we learn and you know, we develop good habits around them. But at the same time you can do a lot of damage before we adjust and learn and develop good habits. It's very much a tool that depends what you make of it. You can use it to go understand something that you didn't understand. It's like quite, quite good at explaining minutiae of some issue you're interested in. You should double check its answers, but you should also double check an answer you get from a source, right? Like in a lot of ways, if you treat it as a source that's very smart but not perfectly reliable and you should check its claims, then you're in the right place. But a lot of people probably aren't using it that way and are taking it as gospel or just using it to confirm what they already believe. And yeah, I think that's a very real risk.

[Host]

Kelsey Piper writes for Vox's Future Perfect. We collaborated with them to make the show today. Full Disclosure Vox, like many other media outfits, has a partnership with OpenAI. If you want to read about it, you can Google Vox Media and OpenAI. Miranda Kennedy edited the show today. Laura Bullard fact checked it. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdotter mixed and Miles Bryan and Denise Guerra produced Boost. Denise is a Gemini.

[Kelsey Piper]

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