If you pay for Twitter (sorry, X), you now have access to Grok, the corporate’s AI bot. Part of this privilege is access to the preferred news feeds on the corporate’s AI-powered Explore tab. The only problem? It’s garbage.
Here’s how Grok’s popular news feed works: The bot collects the “top” posts for any given news story, then generates a news summary from those posts. Pretty easy and something we have seen before with generative AI. But before you fire your human writers and editors and put Grok on the forefront of the news, it is advisable to see this How exactly, reporting works.
It appears that Grok collects joke tweets and spits out AI-generated replies as real news. This will be seen from this post shared by user X BrettaEdited following an earthquake that shook much of the New York metropolitan area. The bot generated the headline: “Adams vs. Earthquake: 50,000 Cops in Subway Skirmish,” after which reports how New York City Mayor Eric Adams is deploying the NYPD to “prevent further earthquakes,” considering using “robotic cops,” and issuing an order : “every cop in town” to “shoot that damn earthquake before it hits again.”
Sure, we live in strange times, but no reasonable person would imagine that Grok’s news summary was accurate. If for some reason you may’t resolve for yourself, you may take a have a look at the preferred posts which might be fueling this news roundup, which on this case are all of the tongue-in-cheek tweets in regards to the mayor’s earthquake response.
The tweet could have been deleted
This is a tragic but funny example of State of X in 2024. Previous versions of the location would have been the a spot where you may follow each legitimate updates on breaking news just like the New York earthquake and laugh at jokes in regards to the situation. Now the web site treats jokes as news. I assume you get what you pay for.
It doesn’t take much foresight to assume this example going from sad but funny to downright dangerous. What happens when Grok decides to “report” something that seems legitimate at first glance, but is predicated on rampant misinformation spreading across the location? User
While we cannot stop the location from spreading this nonsense, we will all collectively agree that we are going to not treat Grok or every other AI-generated source as a legitimate source of news or an accurate summary of the day’s top stories.
Credit : lifehacker.com
