Quote of the day:

In a time of universal deceit—telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
—George Orwell

I’m not sure if I’ve made my disdain for AI clear, but I’m quite certain that I’ve made my contempt for a particular wealthy egomaniac more than evident on multiple occasions.

In any case it gives me great pleasure to throw each of them up for ridicule in the same post. In Friday’s This Week in Schadenfreude, there were several AI-related items, but I’m going to quote from just one. You are welcome, of course, to go and read the entire post if you want to see some more AI nonsense.

Moving along, if there is one AI tool that people are really looking to humiliate, it’s Grok. In that case, you have the anti-AI folks and the anti-Elon-Musk folks coming together in a holy alliance serving the causes of truth, justice and the American way. And last week (not for the first time), the Grok trolls got it to say some very interesting things.

You see, Elon Musk has a giant ego, and yet a powerful sense of inadequacy. And so, perhaps on his orders, or perhaps just because the programmers wanted to curry favor with him, Grok has been taught to regard him as a godlike figure. It says all kinds of things reminiscent of North Korea’s propaganda operation, like asserting that Elon Musk is one of the ten smartest people in the history of the world, and that he is “worlds ahead” of basketball player LeBron James when it comes to physical fitness.

There is an obvious angle to exploiting this propensity, so obvious that it’s embarrassing that Musk and his people did not think of it. In short, if he is the best in the world at everything, then he’s also the best in the world at certain not-so-admirable activities. And so, in response to prompts from users, Grok was happy to report that Musk really should have won the 2016 AVN award for Best Double Penetration Sex Scene, instead of porn star Riley Reid, because of Musk’s “prodigious output.” Grok also asserted that Musk “has the potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” that his “blowjob prowess edges out Trump’s—his precision engineering delivers unmatched finesse” and that Musk could very well become leader of the world by virtue of being “the ultimate throat goat.” Naturally, when Musk learned about all of this, Grok was taken offline for “adjustments.”