Maybe you don’t know what Grok is. No matter – according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, only 26 percent of Americans have heard of Grok. So for the other 74 percent of you, here you go: Grok is a generative artificial intelligence system developed by X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk. Maybe you know of Chat GPT – which 59 percent of Americans have heard of. Grok is like Chat GPT – except, apparently, it’s remarkably less dependable.
Grok grabbed the attention of a digital site called 404 Media, which does investigative journalism and feature stories on all sorts of technology issues. And 404’s reporters discovered that Grok will tell you that Elon Musk is, essentially, superior to any other human. Ever. At any task, not just building electric cars and rocket ships and making a spectacle of himself.
Maybe Grok has been adjusted by now, but it told 404’s reporters a couple of weeks ago that Elon Musk was better at conquering Europe than Adolf Hitler, that he was a better pitcher than Randy Johnson and that he should have been picked before Peyton Manning in the 1998 NFL Draft. Oh: And he’s a better role model than Jesus.
Some dude, that Elon, right?. Some dependable source of information, that Grok.
I bring this to your attention not to increase your dread of artificial intelligence, though I do think the Trump administration is criminally crazy not to be even exploring how we might control a technology that seems to have the potential to replace most human activity. No, my concern is more narrow than that. I’m just focusing here on the simple question of telling the truth.
I’m a journalist, and I’ve dedicated my career to trying to give people a true sense of what is going on beyond their own view. That’s what journalism is, really: searching for truth and then sharing it. It’s not always an easy task, because for reasons both understandable and corrupt there are usually impediments to finding and understanding what’s true. But good journalists have an ethical devotion to the task, and they will do all they can to report, fairly and honestly, what’s real.
Now, back to grok – the word, I mean, not Elon Musk’s AI platform. Maybe you’re not familiar with grok, as a verb. The word came from a 1961 science fiction book, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” that tells the story of a guy born on Mars who comes to earth in early adulthood. Sci-fi isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, so the word grok hasn’t been in everybody’s vocabulary. But to grok something has come to mean that you understand it deeply – you’ve absorbed its meaning.
And I’m here to tell you that a good reporter tries to grok what you need to know – to absorb everything possible about a topic or an event – in order to convey to you not just what happened, but why, and sometimes to report to you that what you’re being told isn’t true. Good journalism isn’t just stenography. It takes in nuance, adds dimension and context, and sets the record straight if a simplistic view of facts might distort reality.
That is, you might need a reporter who can grok Grok to know why Elon Musk’s AI chatbot is, to put it gently, a bit unreliable. For one thing, Grok primarily draws real-time information from the X social media platform – what we used to call Twitter. Since Musk bought it, X has become rife with with misinformation and manipulated narratives. And Grok seems to have been designed to reflect Elon Musk’s hard-right political leanings and his embrace of right-wing sources. So Grok has embraced the language of Holocaust deniers, for example, since minimizing the evil of Hitler is a thing among a lot of MAGA types these days.
Here's the thing: Grok is absurd, but even if its engineers fix the outrageous stuff, this early-stage AI unreliability ought to warn us against depending on non-human sources for our news. Or, for that matter, depending on sources you don’t know you can trust. We all ought to know by now that raw information that pours into cyberspace isn’t trustworthy. But it’s getting harder to tell the real from the fake, what’s honest from what’s deceitful.
My suggestion, of course, is that you pay attention to known reliable information sources: your local newspaper and public radio station, nonprofit news organizations that have proven their value, national outlets with a history of fearless reporting. The journalists from those organizations are a lot more trustworthy than a multi-billionaire who seemingly manipulates technology for his own glory. Let them do the groking for you.
Rex Smith, the host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
