If you pay for Twitter (sorry, X), you now have access to Grok, the company’s AI bot. Part of this privilege is access to the most popular news feeds on the company’s AI-powered Explore tab. The only problem? It’s garbage.
Here’s how Grok’s Popular News Feed works: The bot collects the “top” posts on any news item, then generates a news summary from those posts. Pretty uncomplicated and something we’ve seen before with generative AI. But before you fire your human writers and editors and put Grok at the forefront of the news, you might want to see this How exactly, reporting works.
It appears that Grok collects joke tweets and spits out AI-generated replies as real news. This can be seen from this post shared by user X BrettaEdited following an earthquake that shook much of the Novel York metropolitan area. The bot generated the headline: “Adams vs. Earthquake: 50,000 Cops in Subway Skirmish,” and then reports how Novel York City Mayor Eric Adams is deploying the NYPD to “prevent further earthquakes,” considering using “robotic cops,” and issuing an order : “every cop in town” to “shoot that damn earthquake before it hits again.”
Sure, we live in strange times, but no reasonable person would believe that Grok’s news summary was precise. If for some reason you can’t decide for yourself, you can take a look at the most popular posts fueling this news roundup, which in this case are tongue-in-cheek tweets about the mayor’s earthquake response.
The tweet may have been deleted
This is a sorrowful but witty example of State of X in 2024. Previous versions of the site would have been the a place where you can follow both legitimate updates on breaking news like the Novel York earthquake and laugh at jokes about the situation. Now the website treats jokes as news. I guess you get what you pay for.
It doesn’t take much foresight to imagine this situation going from sorrowful but witty to downright unsafe. What happens when Grok decides to “report” something that seems legitimate at first glance, but is based on rampant misinformation spreading across the site? User
While we cannot stop the site from spreading this nonsense, we can all collectively agree that we will not treat Grok or any other AI-generated source as a legitimate source of news or an precise summary of the day’s top stories.
