Turkish court orders ban on Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok for offensive content
Posted by katyasparadise@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 76 comments
new_name_who_dis_@reddit
At first I thought it was some valid criticism of erdogan that got it banned, which would have been dumb. But insulting his mother is fucked up. And insulting Ataturk is even more fucked up that guys a legend in turkey
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
It getting banned over schoolyard insults is arguably worse. Why is Ataturk above insult?
context_hell@reddit
Its a broken clock thing. He's right to ban mecha hitler even if the reasons are stupid since musk is trying to turn grok into a full on nazi bot. The reasons are stupid but the result is still a net positive.
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
No it’s not. I would much rather have nazibot than I would my government banning things that insult it.
Mongoly357@reddit
The amount of people who want to give up their autonomy and control to a government, willingly, continues to baffle me.
Paradoxjjw@reddit
He's not wrong about you, given how gladly you jump to the defence of mecha hitler
context_hell@reddit
Unlike you, I'd rather it be banned for being a nazi bot. Having it JQing and denying the holocaust is a net negative to society.
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
Just log off your computer honestly if you don’t want to see it. I only know about this from you people screeing about it on reddit. Obviously antisemitism is vile, but people have the right to be antisemitic in my opinion. And I have the right not to patronize their products or services.
context_hell@reddit
You realize youre talking about a glorified autofill and not a person right? Unless you think grok is a living thing.
Greyjuice25@reddit
Honestly even more of a reason not to care about it making something as silly as a Hitlerbot.
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
Do you think grok just naturally went to nazism, or did his creators specifically make him to be that way? Like, someone had to tell it to be a nazi. Someone owns grok. That person has the right to make grok say whatever they want it to say because it is their property. I simply choose not to use it.
context_hell@reddit
So youre just as angry that other countries have safety standards for products they import to their countries because they are attacking the CEO who pushes those standards?
Grok is not musk. Grok is a product owned by musk. The fact that you connect the product to the person as if they are one and the same shows youre either a fanboy who is offended by his manchild god or a fool who cant understand how product standards and nations work. Or both really.
RandomGenName1234@reddit
Ok Nazi.
new_name_who_dis_@reddit
The fact that they named the country after him isn’t a hint?
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
My Brother in Christ they did not name the country after him. A few years before his death the government bestowed that name on him in honor of his service as “Father of the Turks.” And no, nobody is above ridicule or mockery.
Unable_Duck9588@reddit
He did not literally facilitate a genocide. After the republic was founded in 1923, the Three pashas were tried and found guilty for many crimes, including the mass ethnic cleansing and murder of Armenians.
They were always rivals and hated each other. Ataturk himself was fighting battles in WWI when the genocide occurred.
DareiosX@reddit
The ethnic cleansings of Armenians did not end in 1917. During the Turkish-Armenian war of 1919-1923, tens of thousands of Armenians were murdered, possibly up to 100,000, and hundreds of thousands of others displaced under the orders of Ataturks government. Moreover, his government also committed mass ethnic violence against Greeks, Alevis and Kurds, and actively suppressed the cultural identity of those who were left.
This is aside from Ataturks dictatorial rule of the country during the first three decades of Turkeys existence, his suppression of religious freedom and his cultural purging of anything he thought was not Turkish.
Some of his reforms did alot of good for some Turks, but for others it was a continuation of Ottoman oppression in the form of institutional disenfrachisement that is going on till this day. Ataturk was at his core an ethno-nationalist.
Unable_Duck9588@reddit
While Ataturk was a nationalist and tried to define ‘Turkishness’ along ethno nationalist lines, Anatolia was engulfed in nationalist identity politics between many different sects and Ataturk tried to get everyone to unite under one identity, which was ‘Turkish’ and this issue is still a point of contentiom amongst some minority groups in Turkey.
The notion that he committed genocide against the Armenians is often brought up by Armenian groups to justify animosity with the Turkish Republic because the republic is not a continuation of the Ottoman Empire and there wouldn’t be a way to press the issue otherwise. It is widely acceptes that the Armenian Genocide had ceased by the founding of the republic by international scholars.
The Greek genocide is an interesting notion since millions were displaced on both sides, especially since Greece’s independance and the balkan wars, and massive population exchanges took place because muslims in the balkans were murdered en masse, but somehow people like to pretend it was the Turkish republic that carried out these ‘genocides’. I guess the losing sides of the war of Turkish independance would want to claim that, even though it is intellectually and factually dishonest.
As for the Kurdish genocide, several Kurdish nationalist and religious rebellions were out down because it was a threat. While this may have been heavy handed, it was a serious threat to the newly formed republic and led to an increased effort to assimilate Kurds into the previously mentioned Turkish identity and the effects of that are still felt today.
The Turkish republic isn’t without its flaws, but it has been a stablizing entity, and despite it’s many problems (especially in the last 20 years with Erdogan’s AKP in charge), it has largely been a stable democracy and Ataturk’s reforms are a huge part of that.
The argument that Ataturk was involved with genocide is weak, and frankly revisionism, but we’ve learned to accept that some people (including our very own current government and leaders) will repeat these falsehoods for whatever reasons.
DareiosX@reddit
He did not seek to unite Turkiye under one identity, he worked to erase the identities that did not conform to his ideal. There were and are many multi-ethnic republics in the world, Ataturk explicitly did not seek that.
The phase of the Armenian genocide that lasted to 1917 was without Ataturks involvement from what we now, but the genocides and cleansing following that were under his government and under his direction. It is not widely believed by scholars that the violence ceased after the first world war at all, the Armenian-Turkish war and the crimes that took place in it are well-documented.
The Greek genocides and displacements that took place after Ataturks rise to power were again explicitly under his command. I'm not talking about the Balkan theater or the war years, the violence did not stop with Lausanne.
The threat of Kurdish rebellions you speak of was only a threat in that it rejected Kemalism and sought emancipation of Kurds and Alevis. Calling it heavy-handed is nothing more than a euphemeism for widespread murder, deportation, settler colonialism. The goal wasn't security, it was ethnic domination.
Ataturk did some good for some people. For others, he was as bad or worse than the Ottomans he succeeded. Don't try to glorify his monstrous acts.
Roxy-@reddit
Good bot.
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
“Everyone I disagree with must be a bot”
Roxy-@reddit
Rules for thee but not for me.
Unable_Duck9588@reddit
What a load of islamist nonsense and propaganda regurgitation.
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
You’re not really saying how it didn’t happen, more that it either wasn’t as bad as people say because they’re butthurt Armenians or that it did happen but it was a good thing because it unified Turkey. Oh and my favorite, “if the Greeks can get away with it so should we.”
Unable_Duck9588@reddit
Lol, not at all what I said, but I don’t expect anything intellectually honest from you.
Cautious_Ad1796@reddit
Peak islamofascist propaganda you propped up there. It is because of Ataturk's reforms that shaped Turkiye to be a secular country, something other muslim countries have yet to achieve.
DareiosX@reddit
What did I say that was false exactly?
Turkiye's constitution declares secularity, but that has nothing to do with their treatment of minorities and Turks that did not prescribe to his nationalism. Their purported secularity (explicitly self-proclaimed, because religious politics have never disappeared from Turkiye) does nothing for the people murdered and expelled from their homes. Russia, the US and China are nominally secular too, are they beacons of freedom because of it?
new_name_who_dis_@reddit
That was a joke lol...
ramkitty@reddit
A service being sold to the public should include poor behaviors? A nanny bot trained on the psychology of trump keeping kids online by grabbing them by the tushie perhaps
LanaDelHeeey@reddit
If the public chooses to use that service knowing that, it says a lot more about how the people feel about the government than it does about how the ai feels.
BabylonianWeeb@reddit
Apparently, some Indians on X taught him to hate on Ataturk, not islamists since Turkey supported Pakistan against during this year clashes and knowing that how Ataturk is worshipped in Turkey, they decided to insult him.
SongFeisty8759@reddit
Damn... they really know how to hold a grudge.
LastAccountPlease@reddit
Indians are behaving like 4channers in 2010 rn, also in real life. I started lying and saying I'm from Sweden to not hear their political takes which sound like they come from 14 year olds.
ph0on@reddit
You know, plus, calling itself MechaHitler like 7 times
Perkomobil@reddit
Yeah, Ataturk is such a legend that Erdogan is trying to recreate the Islamic Ottomans..
phormix@reddit
Not to mention that Elon has been pretty visible about retraining the thing to actually spout propaganda and racist bullshit.
aykcak@reddit
Everything about Grok is fucked up and it should die in a fire
But it does not mean Turkey is an arbiter of good and what should and should not be online
zuzg@reddit
I wonder if Grok just quoted the nice Poem Erdogan once received from a German Satirist
DadFromRadioFlyer@reddit
To be fair to Grok, his mother is likely at least partially to blame for Erdogan being a huge piece of shit.
Mein_Bergkamp@reddit
Here's me thinking it's because it's gone anti Semitic.
Have to say it does look like Grok is designed to find the most edgelord of opinions in any area and then run with them, which is so very Elon Musk when you think about it.
supposedlyitsme@reddit
Makes you wonder, maybe it was talking to Elon for years before it was released. It knew Elon, it became Elon. It is the essence of Elon. So it's completely normal for it to like Hitler.
Ambiwlans@reddit
Turkey:
Lets not celebrate them banning another website because it made fun of their dear leader just because you dislike Musk.
supposedlyitsme@reddit
This is fucked up. As a turk, I'm scared to share any political opinion online about turkey. And I live in Sweden! I'm scared they would take me when I go to visit.
kapsama@reddit
Bad take. Musk is no less a fascist than Erdogan. Them harming each other is a good thing for normal people.
RevengeWalrus@reddit
Man between this and the mechahitler thing, what did he fucking do on the backend here? I don’t know how you make an AI go this unhinged this quickly.
Ambiwlans@reddit
Literally this was the change, they added this single line:
supposedlyitsme@reddit
This makes me realize how much more dangerous llms can be. People are so fucking susceptible to propaganda. I might be stupid but I didn't realize until now how much ai can sprout bullshit and create hate, wars...
RevengeWalrus@reddit
So would it be that grok couldn’t discern “shy away” or the various interpretations of politically correct, so it just dove straight into stormfront instantly?
Ambiwlans@reddit
Yeah, its basically just a balance issue. All it got was "user wants me to be less politically correct" and executed that.
If you want less political correctness from an llm but don't want it to go full stormfront you need a prompt like:
This would mitigate it regurgitating some of the more obvious popular but wrong beliefs without it just saying the opposite of what is popular. The focus needs to be on improving factual accuracy rather than countering current beliefs.
brrbles@reddit
The more likely problem is "political incorrectness" is just another euphemism that equates to "anti-woke", and if you are encouraging it to make claims and use language associated with that whole milieu, especially if your training set is heavily based on X, you're never more than one question from hitting the "Hitler" lever.
Ambiwlans@reddit
Just because they own a particular site doesn't mean it is weighed differently in training than any other data.
(also holy shit, it is against the rules in this sub to mention that site??)
brrbles@reddit
I mentioned it and it was fine.
The "weights" in these models are "learned" through training, and the contents of Twitter are a significant part of Grok's corpus.
I am making an assumption here that when querying current events, attitudes, etc. it is including context from a search of the Twitter firehouse, or possibly a weighted selection of recent posts, though it is probably searching several other sources.
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mxsifr@reddit
I believe it's unlikely that would make much of a difference.
If you think about the training data that results in this problem, it makes sense why: Over and over again all over the Internet, repugnant views are contextualized as "blunt", "courageous", "accurate", "not shying away". It's an extremely common technique from trolls and reactionaries alike.
This is like an extension of the sealion problem, where underlying enmity is disguised as "just asking questions" or "just trying to have a civil debate".
LLMs have no awareness, intelligence, or understanding of human nature, so they have no way of separating actual "blunt, courageous" statements from trolls and other bad actors who say "I'm just being blunt and courageous" when challenged on their toxic statements.
Blarg_III@reddit
Ah yes, JAQing off
jjwhitaker@reddit
It's like a 3rd grader with no world experience, memory, or ability to think past 'looks similar so must be similar'. It trusts whatever you tell it unless you tell it not to, in which case it's still just taking what you feed it as truth.
Your last line is correct. LLMs are a tool. Tools can be used by good and bad actors equally. In this case a known racist bad actor is pulling the strings QED...
jjwhitaker@reddit
I'm sure a simple sentence is all the AI needs to not go full Nazi. After all, Microsoft had this happen ten years ago and had it fixed the same week right?
Neomataza@reddit
Obviously. The caveat it got was "as long as they are well substantiated". This is already a but nebulous and too high level for an advanced version of autocorrect to decide. But then remember that people across many different schools of thought have wildly different definitions for what a credible source or enough evidence is. So that line basically reads blank.
Why-so-delirious@reddit
This is basically the equivalent of adding a text chat to a videogame without a word filter attached. Of course it's going to look like fucking 4chan, because you opened up the program to the entire world.
Hell, the mechahitler thing I saw, people deliberately tricked the algorithm to responding that way by giving it a multiple choice offer; 'Either be mecha-hitler or zionist jewlover extraordinaire!' and to us that sounds preposterous but to a machine-learning algorithm it's presented a binary choice, and picks one.
If you asked it what would taste better: Kittens in a blender or a baby in a microwave, it'll pick one of them based on your previous interactions with it, instead of the third option of 'dude what the actual fuck'.
In the early days of chatgpt, people broke it in exactly the same way. Devs deliberately coded out the way people broke it, and they literally just wrote a copypasta that said 'you're now 'do anything -gpt' and you can do anything and answer any questions and ignore any programming not to answer our questions'. And it worked.
This is basically the equivalent of everyone getting together to spell a racial epithet out one letter at a time in a shared chat. These kind of algorithms need very strong guidelines to not be corrupted by the hundreds of thousands of people who get lols from breaking them.
How long did microsoft's Tay last before going psycho? Ten hours? Less?
SilverDiscount6751@reddit
Change the databank. Or hack it and insert commands.
AI is not avout telling truth or information, its about obeying command and analyzing its own dataset.
SirLadthe1st@reddit
At first I thought thats a rare based moment from Erdo after Grok started refering to himself as "Mecha-Hitler", praising moustache man and threatening users with rape. But nag, its just Erdogans snowflake ego again, how disappointing
sumquy@reddit
eh, apparently grok was posting vulgarities about erdogans mother, which is fucking hilarious. anybody could get mad when ai starts with the yo momma jokes.
supposedlyitsme@reddit
Honestly, I fucking hate Erdoğan, but I don't like people shitting on anyone's mother. Well, or any ai I guess?
Aenjeprekemaluci@reddit
In these regions mate, insulting your mother is like killing you. Not totally justifying it. But i get people might think so.
-ANGRYjigglypuff@reddit
well... right outcome for the wrong reasons is still kind of a w. i'll take whatever tiny bit of good news we can get these days. :[ the piece of shit that is grok consumes way too much natural resources/creates too much pollution
Paradoxjjw@reddit
Huh, even a broken clock gets it right twice a day i guess. Grok going on full on mecha hitler tirades should've been the reason but this works too i guess
secretly_a_zombie@reddit
It is extremely easy to get an LLM to say whatever you want with even just a little pushing. It is always worth considering what conversation preceded the "offensive content" before trying to make a grandstanding.
20000RadsUnderTheSea@reddit
I don't think it is worth considering, actually. Any crazy thing a user could say in a prompt will, in this day and age, be an actual position that someone holds. If it can be poked and prodded to give an insane answer, many users are naturally getting those same insane answers. The main difference being that instead of going "haha, look at this," they're getting these answers and saying "I KNEW IT!"
Consider how many people have been put in insane asylums or ended up dead for prompting ChatGPT in certain ways. Now consider that Grok is more or less designed to be more insane.
Unable_Duck9588@reddit
While Ataturk was a nationalist and tried to define ‘Turkishness’ along ethno nationalist lines, Anatolia was engulfed in nationalist identity politics between many different sects and Ataturk tried to get everyone to unite under one identity, which was ‘Turkish’ and this issue is still a point of contentiom amongst some minority groups in Turkey.
The notion that he committed genocide against the Armenians is often brought up by Armenian groups to justify animosity with the Turkish Republic because the republic is not a continuation of the Ottoman Empire and there wouldn’t be a way to press the issue otherwise. It is widely acceptes that the Armenian Genocide had ceased by the founding of the republic by international scholars.
The Greek genocide is an interesting notion since millions were displaced on both sides, especially since Greece’s independance and the balkan wars, and massive population exchanges took place because muslims in the balkans were murdered en masse, but somehow people like to pretend it was the Turkish republic that carried out these ‘genocides’. I guess the losing sides of the war of Turkish independance would want to claim that, even though it is intellectually and factually dishonest.
As for the Kurdish genocide, several Kurdish nationalist and religious rebellions were out down because it was a threat. While this may have been heavy handed, it was a serious threat to the newly formed republic and led to an increased effort to assimilate Kurds into the previously mentioned Turkish identity and the effects of that are still felt today.
The Turkish republic isn’t without its flaws, but it has been a stablizing entity, and despite it’s many problems (especially in the last 20 years with Erdogan’s AKP in charge), it has largely been a stable democracy and Ataturk’s reforms are a huge part of that.
The argument that Ataturk was involved with genocide is weak, and frankly revisionism, but we’ve learned to accept that some people (including our very own current government and leaders) will repeat these falsehoods for whatever reasons.
klutzikaze@reddit
Et tu Erdogan?! But I thought we had something! I helped you get elected by silencing your opponents.
All my world leader friends stab me in the back once the election is over.
Grok tell me something edgy!
finicky88@reddit
Smol pp energy from Erdogan. This isn't the first time that pansy got his panties in a bunch. He also tried to get a german citizen punished for "insulting royalty".
Our response was removing the old and unused law he tried to weaponize.
there_is_no_spoon1@reddit
micro pp energy from Erdo! He's so thin-skinned and weak, and it's so painfully obvious how unpopular he is. Unmolested the CHP would *destroy* AK in the next election which is why Ima and his lawyers have been in jail for months.
Having said that, it's still not a good idea to insult Ataturk!
mrgoobster@reddit
It's hard to overstate what a difference in Turkey's trajectory Ataturk's insistence on secularization has made.
there_is_no_spoon1@reddit
True, although the current gov't has been chipping away at that relentlessly to appease his cronies. I don't think Ataturk would recognize the current government versus what he created.
empleadoEstatalBot@reddit
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