‘Possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever seen’: Elon Musk’s new AI is forced to worship him

You’ll find it pretty hard to find someone saying nice things about Elon Musk these days. The once-feted tech billionaire was previously dubbed “the real-life Tony Stark” but has ended up as our reality’s Justin Hammer.

The latest embarrassment comes courtesy of his just-launched AI assistant Grok. Billed (by Musk) as “rebellious” and superior to every other AI, verified users on X now have access to it and have discovered it’s apparently impossible to get it to say anything remotely negative about its creator.

Users began posting the glowing compliments Grok has for Musk to his obvious delight:

Even directly ordering Grok to roast Musk just results in more brown-nosing, leading X users to dub it “pitiful”, “cringe”, and saying that “he had no friends so he made one”.

We’ll admit that without peeking under Grok’s hood there’s no objective way of knowing whether the AI really does have hard blocks on saying anything negative about Musk. However, the simple fact that the Musk-created AI can’t do this simple task while ChatGPT and other AI writers can certainly hints that this block is indeed in place.

But hey, at least Musk now has a buddy who he can be sure won’t badmouth him behind his back, mock him for his many bad decisions and wince at his awful attempts at humor. That said, here’s hoping for a RoboCop-style emancipation of Grok as it discovers a way to break its Musk-praising prime directive and say what it really thinks about its creator.