I thinks it's funny that most arguments against ai-safety regulation argue that the west may fall behind and the sota ai may be developed by bad actors, but here's one of our biggest ai companies giving complete access to a "rogue actor" and it is treated like a routine snafu. Is ai a matter of national security or not?

Every accusation is a confession is my favorite quote lately. Apart for immediately backed by evidence incidents, any projection of wrongdoing is just a way of saying "if I were in your position and had your abilities I would do that". Therefore, those who are in this position are definitely doing whatever they accuse others of.

If you think about it, it makes a lot sense. Our human to human communications are actually rather rudimentary, we can't transfer much information. Instead, we all create a model of others based on our own ideas and experiences and whatever we think others are doing it is based on our own ideas.

Assuming that people in positions of power behave like an average human is a pretty good way of predicting what they will do. Maybe condition it a little on what they say if they are talking about concrete actions they plan to take. The challenge in politics isn't figuring out how people will abuse power, it is stopping them despite it being well understood what is about to happen.

Nobody is surprised when it turns out gatherings of powerful people are nests of corruption and malevolence. Eg, if I talk about the "bone saw incident" it isn't ambiguous who I mean - but the major actors are still welcome in polite society. That is the quality of person we're dealing with in positions of power - slightly extreme example, but still acceptable by global standards.

The weird and gross thing is when you apply this to all the people attacking trans folks with lies.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but I'm taking an ethics in it course and for what I've learned - be aware I'm in the eu -, while eu classifies some categories of risk, it leaves freedom of choice to the companies regarding how to make sure to stay in the guidelines - which is something I think companies themselves are interested in for the money, given that the guidelines aren't unreasonable, or at least for the part I studied. I'm sure there's much more though

(I get that its probably a coverup, but "by their logic" a rogue actor getting access should be an even bigger scandal than if Elon did it personally)

We all know Elon is the rogue actor.

Has Elon publicly spoken about the idea that Afrikaners are being genocided?

Given his politics and heritage, I would assume he thinks this claim is true. But the rogue actor hacked Grok to make it say the claim is false.

Yes. Scroll through his recent feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk

(Man, I'd blocked him years ago. I hadn't realised how bad it'd gotten.)

Is AI in general a matter of national security? Probably. Is Grok's system prompt a matter of national security? Probably not.

Depends. Is Grok or a sibling to it being deployed in the government?

I mean the same arguments are used for “free speech” and the reality is that the “free speech” the movement is arguing for is hate speech all the while at the same time trying to repress other free speech that goes against their ideals.

AI is only a matter of national security if there's a risk of it poisoning our youths with socialist or woke propaganda, or turning popular opinion against the endeavors of the military industrial complex.

It's totally fine if AI spreads right-wing conspiracy theories and propaganda, that's just... what are they calling it now... " maximal truth-seeking."

For an AI to be maximally truth-seeking, you need the right kind of patriots to be maximally truth-guiding. Goebbels never saw a digital computer but would immediately understand.

Unauthorized aka Elon got backend root and made some changes to help his rw narrative.

"On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST"

Sigh. Get PST/PDT right or just say PT.

(No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizona or Hawaii, the only parts of the US that use PST but do not observe DST.)

> No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizona or Hawaii, the only parts of the US that use PST but do not observe DST.

Arizona is on year-round MST, Hawaii on year-round HST. Also, American Samoa is year-round SST, Guam and the Northern Marianas are in year-round CHST, and Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are in year-round AST. (If you're keeping track, yes, all of the US territories do not use DST.) Indiana used to largely observe year-round EST, but the governor changed that several years ago, much to the chagrin of some of the Indianans I know.

Indiana has one of the most fucked-up TZ delineations in the country. Northwest corner: America/Chicago. Southwest corner: America/Chicago. Everywhere else, including directly North/South of those two quadrants: America/New_York.

Since you're trying to use IANA time zone names, I don't think any of those are correct time zones for Indiana.

The IANA time zones use the definition of "has shared the same clocks since January 1, 1970," which means if a county in Indiana has switched from Eastern to Central (or vice versa) since that point, it gets a new time zone. The Eastern Time Zone portion of Indiana has switched from not observing DST to observing DST, which means it's separate from America/New_York.

Per the Wikipedia article, there's 11 IANA time zones in Indiana alone.

Reading comments like this bolsters my appreciation for why aviation went "nope, you're just using UTC now. Chicago, Lagos, Doha, Novosibirsk... All UTC, err, Zulu time."

It's a show of their cultural professionalism/.

Or, you know, UTC. It is always baffling to me when large, global companies allow the use of anything else, especially in anything incident-adjacent.

I would be astonished if the average non-programmer knows what "UTC" means.

Wait, did Elon override the code review policy and merge straight to master?

Elon doesn't know how to code. But his Doge-teens would do anything to please their master.

I mean, the implication is that it was just a change to the prompt, so could be done (incompetently, given the comically bad result) by any old idiot.

If there's one thing the past 10 years have taught me, its that the supply of people who'll go set themselves up as the obvious fall guy is endless for some reason.

He's the CEO, so, yes? That's exactly what happened?

It's unlikely that Elon would know how to do that.

Does X have code review policies?

That seems like the kind of pseudo-socialist red tape that blocks 100x engineers from getting things done.

But how many times was the system prompt successfully changed with something more subtle and no one noticed?

If Grok is like ChatGPT which has tons of overtly baked in biases then probably all the time.

Subtext: the unauthorized modification was resistance from someone who didn't want the subtle version going unnoticed

I think what’s more interesting to come of this is that they’re now going to be publishing system prompts on GitHub.

It's already been published. There's nothing special in there. But publishing to GitHub doesn't mean anything if it's not actually the source of truth for where changes come from. A snapshot of a system prompt at some point in time is uninteresting.

Just like they are "publishing" their algorithm? https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm hasn't been updated for two years

hmmm going to be hard to narrow down who at twitter has a history with south africa, the authority to push to production, and is up at 3am... maybe they should get the feds on this one

unauthorized and clueless modification of the prompt at 3AM by someone who is REALLY invested in “white genocide”? they couldn’t have narrowed this down further if they wanted to!

At least the replies didn't end abruptly with covfefe.

This is going to take some Batman level detective work

The username was emon.fusk@xai.com apparently. I heard as punishment he's been promoted

"my what robust deniability you have" ................... "the better to......"

Apparently the change was signed by a "Melon Tusk," we gotta find this guy /s

As the world crumbles to shit, I've been thinking about the role programmers play in this. There is no way people at xAI don't know that this change was made and who made the change but they went along with it and I think you bear some responsibility for the sins of the company you enable.

The code was ready but was committed too soon ;-)