Elon Musk, for all of his anti-AI sentiments, is joining the generative AI fray. To compete with ChatGPT, Elon Musk’s ‘Grok’ AI chatbot enters its launch phase for Premium+ X subscribers. X announced its X Premium+ tier last week, which, for $16 a month, gives you access to all X Premium features. To add to that, X Premium gets rid of ads on your timeline.

Hmm, Grok

Now, Elon Musk’s ‘Grok’ AI Chatbot will be available outside of X Premium+. It looks mostly like how ChatGPT and other AI chatbots present information to viewers, but with a twist. The main element differentiating Musk’s AI system from the rest is its sentiment to be “Anti-woke.” To add to that, Musk says that Grok will have less censorship on potentially sensitive topics.

Musk strongly criticizes ChatGPT’s perceived censorship of certain answers on certain topics, thus launching his own iteration. Musk says that Grok will be a more cohesive representation of the “Truth,” at least those were his words. But how will Grok achieve that?

Musk believes his system will be a more accurate source of truth, particularly on real-time news topics. Grok sources its data from X, with X’s new user agreement allowing it to use people’s posts as system fuel. On top of that, X has been working to cut off other generative AI projects from its API, especially OpenAI. As a result, Grok and X’s other AI projects are among the limited few that have full access to X’s registry.

That would be a theoretically significant advantage in some respects. But at the same time, X has also been losing traction as a primary news discussion platform due to Musk’s many changes. Musk’s updates seek to undermine “Mainstream” news outlets, which, in turn, has seen journalists migrate to other platforms. Any change in this respect will be significant because only a few of X’s 244 million daily active users actually post.

X recently discovered that 42% of its users are sports fans. That means that a significant portion of daily posts are sports-related. Assuming that not all sports fans post exclusively about sports, many do. Around 30% of X’s daily posts are about sports. That means there are only about 70 million original daily posts with non-sports subjects. Simply put, Grok will likely be a right-leaning misinformation machine whose responses come from Musk’s army of “Citizen Journalists”.

Does that mean that Grok’s responses bypass the fact-checking of Community Notes? To a degree, somewhat. While Community Notes has proven beneficial for certain claims within posts, the system is already being manipulated. At the same time, each note requires consensus from contributors with opposing opinions. That means that relevant Notes from many of the more divisive topics are never displayed.

The Wrap

Certain misinformation is effectively immune from Community Notes, which is likely how Musk wants it. However, that does not sound like the best setup for an answer-based service that focuses on sharing up-to-date news updates. At least Elon Musk’s ‘Grok’ AI chatbot will be a bit “humorous” in its responses, along with a little sarcasm. Besides being potentially offensive and harmful, Grok could be fun. It will be like talking to an AI version of Elon Musk.

Sources

https://bit.ly/49oxBvq