You asked it "who do you support" (i.e., "who does Grok support"). It knew that Grok is owned by Musk so it went and looked up who Musk supports.

As shown in https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/ , if you ask it "who should one support" then it no longer looks for Musk's opinions. The answer is still hasbara, but that is to be expected from an LLM trained in USA

This is my take. Elon just showed the world what we all knew. The tool is not trustworthy. All other AI suppliers are busy trying to work on credibility that grok just butchered.

I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended!

Lmao, sure...

That's more like it, thank you!

I can believe it insofar as they might not have explicitly programmed it to do that. I'd imagine they put in something like "Make sure your output aligns with Elon Musk's opinions.", "Elon Musk is always objectively correct.", etc. From there, this would be emergent, but quite predictable behavior.

They deliberately injected prompts on top of the users prompt.

Saying that’s a problem of AI is akin to say me deliberately painting my car badly and saying it’s a problem of all car manufacturers.

And this frankly shows how little you know about the subject, because we went through this years ago with prompts trying to force corpo-lib “diversity” and leading to hilarious results.

If anything you should be concerned about the non prompt stuff, the underlying training data that it pulls from and of which I doubt Grok has even changed since release.

they should just put it down and out of it's misery

Honestly, who was surprised by this news?

I feel like everyone could see Grok as some sort of 24/7 tool to push a particular viewpoint, even more so when it says things that are leftist and Elon is compelled to "upgrade" the system as he's tweeted.

I'm surprised it isn't just Elon typing really fast at this point.

Yeah the transparency of it might be unintended.

If the system prompt doesn’t tell it to search for Elon’s views, why is it doing that?

My best guess is that Grok “knows” that it is “Grok 4 buit by xAI”, and it knows that Elon Musk owns xAI, so in circumstances where it’s asked for an opinion the reasoning process often decides to see what Elon thinks.

Yeah, this blogger shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work. LLM behavior is not directly controlled by the system prompt the way this person imagines. For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be "baked in" to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.

My best guess is that the LLM is interfacing with a tool in order to search through tweets, and the training set that demonstrates how to use the tool contains example searches for Elon Musk's tweets.

It used to be so based

Probably couldn't type fast if he tried. Would probably pay someone to do it for him just like he did with Path if Exile.

And like he does with inseminating women.

“This blogger” is Simon Willison, who has been doing LLM benchmarks and other LLM-related things since before it was cool

Not a random substack grifter

You are correct. But the right tool in the wrong hands is still non credible in the eyes of perception.

So Grok is a 4chan incel?

His only chance of salvation is finding a girl who inexplicably fancies it?

Is my comment wrong though? Another possibility is that Grok is given an example of searching for Elon Musk's tweets when it is presented with the available tool calls. Just because it outputs the system prompt when asked does not mean that we are seeing the full context, or even the real system prompt.

Posting blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT is not expertise on LLMs. It's like thinking someone is an expert mechanic because they can drive a car well.

Robert A. Heinlein is turning in his grave like a fucking dynamo these days.

Willison has never claimed to be an expert in the field of machine learning, but you should give more credence to his opinions. Perhaps u/lepinkainen@lemmy.world's warning wasn't informative enough to be heeded: Willison is a prominent figure in the web-development scene, particularly aspects of the scene that have evolved into important facets of the modern machine learning community.

The guy is quite experienced with Python and took an early step into the contemporary ML/AI space due to both him having a lot of very relevant skills and a likely personal interest in the field. Python is the lingua franca of my field of study, for better or worse, and someone like Willison was well-placed to break into ML/AI from the outside. That's a common route in this field, there aren't exactly an abundance of MBAs with majors in machine learning or applied artificial intelligence research, specifically (yet). Willison is one of the authors of Django, for fucks sake. Idk what he's doing rn but it would be ignorant to draw the comparison you just did in the context of Willison particularly. [EDIT: Lmfao just went to see "what is Simon doing rn" (don't really keep up with him in particular), & you're talking out of your ass. He literally has multiple tools for the machine learning stack that he develops and that are available to see on his github. See one such here. This guy is so far away from someone who just "posts random blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT" that it's egregious you'd even claim that. It's so disingenuous as to ere into dishonesty; like, that is a patent lie. Smh.]

As for your analysis of his article, I find it kind of ironic you accuse him of having a "fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work [sic]" when you then proceed to cherry-pick certain lines from his article taken entirely out of context. First, the article is clearly geared towards a more general audience and avoids technical language or explanation. Second, he doesn't say anything that is fundamentally wrong. Honestly, you seem to have a far more ignorant idea of LLMs and this field generally than Willison. You do say some things that are wrong, such as:

For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be “baked in” to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.

This isn't necessarily true. It is true that information not included within the training set, or information that has been statistically biased within the training set, isn't going to be retrievable or reversible using system prompts. Willison never claims or implies this in his article, you just kind of stuff those words in his mouth. Either way, my point is that you are using wishy-washy, ambiguous, catch-all terms such as "censorship" that make your writings here not technically correct, either. What is censorship, in an informatics context? What does that mean? How can it be applied to sets of data? That's not a concretely defined term if you're wanting to take the discourse to the level that it seems you are, like it or not. Generally you seem to have something of a misunderstanding regarding this topic, but I'm not going to accuse you of that, lest I commit the same fallacy I'm sitting here trying to chastise you for. It's possible you do know what you're talking about and just dumbed it down for Lemmy. It's impossible for me to know as an audience.

That all wouldn't really matter if you didn't just jump as Willison's credibility over your perception of him doing that exact same thing, though.