If you pay for Twitter (sorry, X), you now have access to the company’s AI bot Grok. Part of that privilege includes access to the trending news feed in the company’s artificial intelligence-powered Explore tab. The only problem? This is garbage.
Here’s how Grok’s Trending News Feed seems to work: The bot collects the “top” posts related to any news story, then generates news summaries from those posts. Simple enough, and something we’ve seen creative AI do before. But before you fire your human writers and editors and put Grok in charge of news, you might want to check out How Absolutely this reporting works.
Grok appears to be collecting prank tweets and spitting out an AI-generated response as real news. You can see that in this post shared by X user Brett redacted after the earthquake that shook much of the New York City metro area. The bot headlined: “Adams vs. Earthquake: 50,000 cops in subway showdown,” then reported how New York City Mayor Eric Adams is considering the use of “robo cops” for the NYPD to “prevent more earthquakes.” deploying and ordering that “every policeman in the city” shoot Earthquake before he strikes again.
Sure, we live in strange times, but no reasonable person would ever believe that Grok’s news summary was accurate. If you somehow can’t decide for yourself, you can take a look at the top posts fueling this news roundup, which in this case, are all the hilarious tweets about the mayor’s response to the earthquake.
The tweet may have been deleted.
This is a sad but hilarious illustration of the state of X in 2024. Previous versions of the site gave A place to follow both legitimate updates on breaking news like the NYC earthquake and laugh at jokes about the situation. Now, the site treats jokes as news. You get what you pay for, I guess.
It doesn’t take much foresight to imagine how this situation goes from sad but hilarious to downright dangerous. What happens when Grok decides to “report” something that seems legitimate at first glance, but is based on misinformation spread throughout the site? An X user might check the Explore page to see that their city is being bombed, or that a candidate in their election has done something illegal, when neither “story” is actually true. Is.
While we can’t stop the site from pushing this crap, we can all collectively agree not to treat Grok, or any artificial AI for that matter, as legitimate news. as a source of, or as an accurate summary of, the major news of the day.