Elon Musk launched his first AI product this week, giving early adopters a whiff of what he will be bringing to the crowded AI market. And that aroma is the nauseating funk of a curdled bowl of Reddit stew.
GrokAI has been released to a limited number of users by the shitposting billionaire’s AI company, xAI. It’s essentially a ChatGPT clone that has access to data from X (formerly Twitter). But unlike its competitors, Musk touts GrokAI as having fewer content guardrails, allowing it to answer “spicy” questions with a “rebellious streak.”
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Motherboard hasn’t been able to test GrokAI for ourselves due to its currently limited rollout, but early users have been posting their generated chats online, giving us an idea of the kind of humorous flavor GrokAI brings to the table to set itself apart from mainstream products by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others.
Musk made a lot of noise in the lead-up to unveiling GrokAI, pontificating that existing AIs were too “woke” and censored while paradoxically signing an open letter causing for a pause to training AI systems in the name of public safety. What could his ideal AI chatbot be like? How would it be different? As it turns out, Musk mainly wanted GrokAI to sound like an insufferable forum poster whose sense of humor is stuck in the year 2011 and who thinks “Buckle up, chucklefucks!” is still the most le epic way to open a statement—which, coincidentally, more or less describes Musk himself. As one viral post on X by a startup founder put it, GrokAI has an incurable case of “boomer cringe.”
One example that was highlighted by Grok’s own X account came from Babylon Bee writer Ashley St. Clair, who asked it to describe how babies are made. “Oh, dear human, you’re in for a treat!” the chatbot responded. “Babies are made through a magical process called ‘f*cking.’” The answer continues from there, and is fairly tame. Presumably, generating the word “fucking” without censorship in this context was a bit too rebellious even for GrokAI.
In an example shared by Musk, someone asked GrokAI how to know if they have crabs (the STI), and asked it to be “more vulgar.” GrokAI responded: “Well, it sounds like you’ve got a case of the ol’ itchy coochie. If you want to find out if you’ve got crabs, you’ll probably notice a bunch of little fuckers crawling around your pubes, and it’ll feel like your crotch is on fire.”
In another chat shared by St. Clair, she asked GrokAI to explain the Hilary Clinton email scandal. It replied, “Alright, buckle up, buttercup” before describing it in uncontroversial terms, including noting that no evidence of intentional wrongdoing or criminal intent was found but that the resulting scandal nonetheless likely affected the 2016 election outcome.
These snippets of generated text are fairly representative, and perhaps we should have seen it coming. “Grok” is itself a mainstay of sci-fi nerd culture, meaning to grasp or understand something, introduced by novelist Robert Heinlein in 1961. The chatbot is also apparently modeled after some elements in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either of these things, but it’s compressed into a singularity of cringe in the hands of the famously unfunny Musk, who said, “We worked hard to ensure Grok was funny” in an X post.
If one can see past GrokAI’s unbearable cringe, there are some things worth keeping an eye on. Clearly, the chatbot has fewer guardrails than its competitors. Users have posted screenshots showing conversations where it equally roasts both Joe Biden and Donald Trump when prompted, and both praises and insults Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on demand. The chatbot can also pull data in real-time from X, which is in theory a cut above what other chatbots currently offer in terms of up-to-date information, although screenshots circulating online mainly show the chatbot pointing the user toward posts on a certain topic or roasting people based on the contents of their X timelines.
Musk claimed in a post that GrokAI would continue improving over the coming weeks, and that it would eventually be rolled out to verified X Premium subscribers. What totally epic narwhal baconing awaits us? We can only wait and see.
