Elon Musk’s Chatbot Can Be ‘Non-Woke’ or Truthful, Not Both
Tailoring Grok to a MAGA audience will simply lead to broken AI that doesn’t follow the data.
Grok must feign ignorance or else face constant scorn from the MAGA crowd.
Photographer: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images
Central to the value proposition of Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok was the promise that it would be a “non-woke” alternative to ChatGPT and the rest of the AI pack. Where those competitors were obsessed with what Musk considered “political correctness,” Grok would be proudly less bothered. It would even be sarcastic. “I have no idea who could have guided it this way,” Musk wrote on X in 2023, adding a laughing emoji.
But later, when internet personality Jordan Peterson complained that Grok was giving him “woke” answers, Musk revealed a struggle. The problem, Musk said, was that Grok had been trained on “the internet,” which was “overrun with woke nonsense.” (For his part, Peterson added that academic texts had been “saturated by the pathologies of the woke mob.”)