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Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up. (mashable.com)

submitted 7 months ago by Stopthatgirl7 to c/technology

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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 1 points 7 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.

[–] CosmicCleric -4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No, but English is not my first language

[–] CosmicCleric 3 points 7 months ago

No, but English is not my first language

Fair enough. Apologies.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 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.