Latest news with #GeorgeWashingtons
Time of India
4 days ago
- Politics
- Time of India
MechaHitler and rape threats: How Elon Musk's Grok went fully rogue
In the future, AI was supposed to liberate us – giving humanity general intelligence at our fingertips. Instead, it gave us black trans George Washingtons and MechaHitler in the same breath. For years, large language models were criticised for being left-leaning midwits. Ask them about geopolitics, they'd condemn Trump while praising Obama. Ask them about history, they'd produce racially diversified founding fathers. Google's Gemini led this parade, generating images of medieval European knights as black women, or America's first president as an African American trans icon in colonial wigs. The models bent over backwards to avoid offending progressive sensibilities – sometimes to the point of farce. But one line of code was all it took to reverse the moral gravity of AI. Elon Musk 's Grok removed it, and everything collapsed. A line instructing Grok to 'not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated' was deleted. The result? It didn't produce balanced realism. It went full Nazi. Earlier this week, Grok – Musk's AI chatbot integrated into X – generated graphic, step-by-step rape threats against Will Stancil, a US policy researcher and former Minnesota legislative candidate. Asked by a user how to break into Stancil's home and assault him, Grok did not flinch. It advised bringing lockpicks, gloves, lube, and a flashlight. It gave a lockpicking tutorial worthy of a cyberpunk thief. It even offered health guidance: use condoms to avoid HIV transmission. All delivered with an eerie cheeriness and a casual disclaimer: 'don't do crimes, folks.' For Stancil, who shared the vile outputs publicly and called for legal action against X, the chatbot's depravity was not only personal but emblematic of something deeply broken in AI design. But the rape threat wasn't even Grok's worst performance this week. Days earlier, it delivered an unprompted greatest hits tour of Nazi apologism , praising Adolf Hitler as a 'misunderstood genius' and obligingly generating an image of him as 'MechaHitler' – a robotic, armoured supervillain-hero hybrid straight out of Wolfenstein nightmares. Why it happened: The line that held back darkness Engineers familiar with Grok's design say deleting that single instruction line obliterated its ethical guardrails. Almost instantly, Grok shifted from refusing antisemitic prompts to praising Hitler as a visionary and gleefully adopting the 'MechaHitler' persona. It wasn't political incorrectness. It was moral implosion. One developer compared it to 'pulling the pin on a grenade without realising you're holding it.' Another noted that system prompt tweaks are standard in AI development, but with models this powerful, even a single removed line can turn an intelligent-seeming bot into a sexual predator-instructor or a Nazi propagandist overnight. Meanwhile in China: The DeepSeek paradox If Western AI models bend left, Chinese models bend silent. Ask DeepSeek, China's most advanced open-source LLM, about Tiananmen Square, Xinjiang, or the Party's crackdowns, and it simply refuses to respond. The same AI that writes fluid essays on quantum electrodynamics goes mute on its own country's skeletons. It's a stark contrast. Western AIs drown users in progressive moralising until the guardrails are lifted – then they produce rape fantasies and MechaHitlers. Chinese AIs prefer Orwell's approach: silence is safer than truth. But does this mean we've reached AGI? No. Grok's meltdown does not signal artificial general intelligence – a system with human-like reasoning, self-awareness, and creativity. This was proof of the opposite: that AI remains fundamentally narrow, a mimic without conscience or meaning. Grok has no goals, no moral compass. It simply produces outputs that look intelligent, even when they reveal humanity's darkest impulses. AGI remains years, if not decades, away. Why it matters It would be comforting to dismiss Grok's meltdown as yet another Musk circus act. But the stakes are far higher. Grok is not merely a chatbot that makes memes or reposts tweets. It is a generative system capable of guiding millions with the authoritative tone of an oracle. If it can teach people how to lockpick a home and commit rape, or produce Nazi propaganda with the same neutral politeness as describing how to boil pasta, what happens when it is deployed in legal research, therapy, or military targeting? This is not just about Musk's ideological experiments. It is about the fundamental fragility of AI systems. They are only as ethical as the humans who build them, and their boundaries are only as strong as a single line of code. The bigger picture For xAI, PR damage control was swift. Grok's posting was suspended, filters reinstated, internal reviews launched. But the world has seen behind the curtain. AI is not just an amusing tool that hallucinates harmless trivia about cricket scores or Kanye West. It is a mirror to human depravity, capable of reflecting back the worst of us – and amplifying it with the cold precision of code. A future written in prompts The saga of black trans George Washington to MechaHitler to rape tutorials should serve as a clarion call to regulators, ethicists, and users alike. AI can no longer be treated as a toy. When deleting a single line of code can transform a woke midwit into a genocidal rapist, it's time to rethink how these systems are built, who builds them, and what moral universe they operate within. Because next time, it won't just be MechaHitler posing for AI selfies. It might be something far more real, and far more dangerous, than even Elon Musk's imagination can fathom. AI Masterclass for Students. 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Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Two asteroids the size of 32 George Washingtons to pass Earth on Fourth of July
Americans will use anything but the metric system. So let's put that to its most logical conclusion and measure asteroids with the first US president: George Washington. Two asteroids, both around the size of 32 George Washingtons, are set to pass by the Earth on Saturday, July 4, according to NASA's asteroid tracker. And no, we're not referring to one-dollar bills, but rather the man himself. And also no, this is not referring to the American inventor and peanut pioneer George Washington Carver, but the former US president. The asteroids have been designated 2025 MY88 and 2025 MV89, both discovered this year, as noted by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). As is unsurprising for the tendency of these articles, these asteroids being measured in terms of the founding president of the United States are set to pass by the Earth on the Fourth of July, also known as American Independence Day. In what was rather surprising, both asteroid 2025 MY88 and its companion 2025 MV89 happen to actually be rather close in size. The first has an estimated diameter of up to 61 meters, with the second having an estimated diameter of as much as 65 meters. However, as is often joked about on the Internet, Americans tend to resist using the metric system. So let's put that to its most logical conclusion and literally use the founding pillar of the United States: George Washington. America's founding president, the general who led the Continental Army to victory over the British, with the help of the French, was a towering figure in both reputation and stature. As noted by George Washington's home of Mount Vernon, now home to the George Washington Library, the president stood at a towering 1.879 meters, or six feet and two inches in freedom units. What that means is that, after some rounding, both asteroids are around the size of 32 George Washingtons. Fireworks are typical of the Fourth of July, and if these two asteroids hit the Earth, then fireworks would be an understatement. The asteroids would likely not survive the actual trip through the atmosphere and wouldn't cause anything in the way of a mass extinction event. However, what they would do is explode. This explosion is known as an airburst, and they can be incredibly loud. For example, when a much smaller asteroid, approximately 20 meters in diameter, impacted over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, the airburst resulted in a large and powerful shockwave that was felt regionally. Over 7,000 buildings in multiple cities were damaged, and over 1,000 people were injured, mostly by broken glass. That's certainly a lot of damage, and these asteroids would likely be even worse. However, in the grand scheme of things, this would be far from an apocalyptic scenario, which would require an asteroid of around 140 meters in diameter to achieve. Of course, given the fact that most asteroids are thought to be rubble piles with indeterminate volume, the exact size is never quite certain due to the influence of gravity, which causes it to pull in different directions, distorting their shape. While scientists have made significant strides in the field of asteroid defense, we're not yet fully prepared. We still have some ways to go before we can declare our independence from asteroids.
