The real reason is because LLMs are a highly nuanced and technical topic that has been constantly evolving, but any attempt to suggest that LLMs require nuance is met with accusations of AI boosterism and are subsequently ignored. So journalists tend to go with Occam's Razor.
I have tried to offer corrections to incorrect headlines and technical information about LLMs over the past few years but have stopped because I don't have the bandwidth to deal with the "so you support the plagiarism machine" comments every time.
I am really grateful I have a basic understanding of 1) how LLMs work, & 2) zero trust in tech marketing/branding. I would be a lot more afraid of the future otherwise. Its not surprising to me at all that people believe AI models are sentient and capable of apologies.
The gist is down the page. I believe the assertion is sound and is worthy of consideration.
Here’s the thing: Grok didn’t say anything. Grok didn’t
blame anyone. Grok didn’t apologize. Grok can’t do any
of these things, because Grok is not a sentient entity
capable of speech acts, blame assignment, or remorse.
What actually happened is that a user prompted Grok to generate
text about the incident. The chatbot then produced a word sequence
that pattern-matched to what an apology might sound like, because
that’s what large language models do. They predict statistically
likely next tokens based on their training data.
When you ask an LLM to write an apology, it writes something that
looks like an apology. That’s not the same as actually apologizing.
I think when people say "the car says it's low on petrol" they understand the car probably didn't talk but a petrol gauge caused it to display some message. I don't know if you have to police language if people understand what's going on.
At least with LLMs it's not too hard to figure what's going on, unlike certain politicians.
strangers were replying to women’s photos and asking Grok, the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, to “remove her clothes” or “put her in a bikini.” And Grok was doing it. Publicly. In the replies. For everyone to see.
Wow. Thats some really creepy behavior people are choosing to show off publicly.
Grok needs some tighter gaurdrails to prevent abuse.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 32.7 ms ] threadI have tried to offer corrections to incorrect headlines and technical information about LLMs over the past few years but have stopped because I don't have the bandwidth to deal with the "so you support the plagiarism machine" comments every time.
At least with LLMs it's not too hard to figure what's going on, unlike certain politicians.
strangers were replying to women’s photos and asking Grok, the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, to “remove her clothes” or “put her in a bikini.” And Grok was doing it. Publicly. In the replies. For everyone to see.
Wow. Thats some really creepy behavior people are choosing to show off publicly.
Grok needs some tighter gaurdrails to prevent abuse.