Like many people, Stephen King would much rather Elon Musk changed the name of his social media platform X back to Twitter, and that’s an opinion more than a few shareholders would probably echo considering the company’s value has plummeted since he took charge.
It’s hard to think of anything to have been added, removed, updated, or upgraded to the business model that could inarguably be called an improvement, and the latest addition to the ever-expanding roster of experiments has hardly filled the master of horror with unbridled excitement at the newest herald of the incoming – and increasingly inevitable – AI apocalypse.
Musk unveiled Grok, which has been described as an AI chatbot “with a rebellious streak” inspired by Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with its creator giddy at the prospect of its sarcastic responses, even though deciding to share one that saw his X-approved assistant “hilariously” reacting to being asked about a recipe for homemade cocaine was a choice.
The response has been muted to say the least, and King summed up the overall sense of non-existent excitement towards Grok when he fired a wonderfully deadpan shot of his own at Musk’s major reveal.
Of course, King had already made it clear he was sick and tired of the “X” branding, so it wasn’t as if he was ever going to be dripping in exuberance when the CEO continued doing things nobody was asking him to do, as opposed to doing the one thing most of them have asked for.