A shocking story was promoted on the “front page” or main feed of Elon Musk’s X on Thursday:

“Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,” read the headline.

This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.

But, there was one major problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.

Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X’s own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X’s trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.

  • style99
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    1821 year ago

    People who deploy AI should be held responsible for the slander and defamation the AI causes.

        • ArxCyberwolf
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          141 year ago

          Parker, why does Spider-Man have seven fingers in this photo?!

      • @Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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        171 year ago

        Why I imagine Xitter lawyers arguing that was it was neither spoken nor “printed”, they can’t be charged?

        • @shneancy@lemmy.world
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          251 year ago

          how is it fear mongering when shit like this is happening? AI as it stands is unregulated and will continue to cause issues if left this way

          • @maynarkh@feddit.nl
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            -91 year ago

            So will self-driving cars, the oil industry, and a bunch of others. The US is a plutocracy, and Musk has enough power to keep playing around with this, so that’s it. If you want actual change, either start organizing for a general strike or a civil war, since stopping Musk is not on the ballot, and most likely won’t be for either of your lifetimes.

            • @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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              71 year ago

              I mean, if your problem is just narrowly musk, the one guy, you don’t need a whole war; just one shot.

              I’m not advocating this, just pointing out, you know? Not that I have a problem with turning the class massacre into a class war.

              • @maynarkh@feddit.nl
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                11 year ago

                The thing is, the vast majority of terrorist attacks and assassinations are organized by rich people using poor people as pawns to further their political agenda. Such things are rarely born from people who are in touch with society and are compassionate with others.

                9/11 was organized by rich people to get back at other rich people for attacking their business. Even today’s right wing crazies only exist because there is a propaganda machine running on obscene wealth whipping desperate people into a frenzy.

                • @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  I don’t see what terrorism has to do with this. Unless you mean the practical definition of ‘things that upset the wealthy’. Which is dumb. I want a special scary word for things that upset me.

    • @QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      Well if you read OpenAI’s terms of service, there’s an indemnification clause in there.

      Basically if you get ChatGPT to say something defaming/libellous and then post it, you would foot the legal bill for any lawsuits that may arise from your screenshot of what their LLM produced.

  • @sik0fewl@lemmy.ca
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    921 year ago

    To everyone that goes to “X” to get the “real”, unfiltered news, I hope you can see that it’s not that site anymore.

    • SeedyOne
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      1 year ago

      Yet, annoyingly, much of the press still uses it to disseminate news.

      I understand journalism is in a rough spot these days and many are there against their will but something needs to change abruptly. This slow exodus is too slow for democracy to survive '24.

      • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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        01 year ago

        They could use Nostr. It’s a bit similar to going to a square and yelling. The downside is that you are not heard from every corner of it, but I just remembered of this existing and thought that actually the idea is very nice.

    • Queen HawlSera
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      31 year ago

      I’d argue it never was anything outside of pulling net celebs names from hats and claiming they were rapists and racists without evidence, and then having them get chased off the internet, destroying their careers in the process and in some cases causing suicides… Unless they actually did it, because then they were rich and could just buy good publicity or start an Alt-Right circle jerk where they can claim “Wokeness” did it.

    • @Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      it was the “yell at celebrities” website. The whole “buy a blue check” thing destroyed it.

  • darkmogool
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    1 year ago

    “Grok” sounds like a name of a really stupid ork from a D&D capaign.

  • @cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    381 year ago

    Oh, what a surprise. Another AI spat out some more bullshit. I can’t wait until companies finally give up on trying to do everything with AI.

    • Cosmic Cleric
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      211 year ago

      I can’t wait until companies finally give up on trying to do everything with AI.

      I don’t think that will ever happen.

      They’re acceptable of AI driving car accidents that causes harm happen. It’s all part of the learning / debugging process to them.

      • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        The issue is that the process won’t ever stop. It won’t ever be debugged sufficiently

        EDIT: Due to the way it works. A bit like static error in control theory, you know that for different applications it may or may not be acceptable. The “I” in PID-regulators and all that. IIRC

        • @assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          11 year ago

          Due to the way it works. A bit like static error in control theory, you know that for different applications it may or may not be acceptable. The “I” in PID-regulators and all that. IIRC

          Oh great, I’m getting horrible flashbacks now to my controls class.

          Another way to look at it is if there’s sufficient lag time between your controlled variable and your observed variable, you will never catch up to your target. You’ll always be chasing your tail with basic feedback control.

        • Cosmic Cleric
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          1 year ago

          It won’t ever be debugged sufficiently

          It will, someday. Probably years and years down the road (pardon the pun), but it will.

          By the way, you reply to me seems very AI-ish. Are you a bot?

          • @maynarkh@feddit.nl
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            61 year ago

            I guess the argument is that this is what “innovation and disruption” looks like. When they finally iron out so that chatbots won’t invent fake headlines, they will pile on a new technology that endangers us in a new way. This is the acceptable margin of error to them.

      • JackGreenEarth
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        01 year ago

        AI isn’t inherently bad. Once AI cars cause less accidents than human drivers (even if they still cause some accidents) it will be moral to use them on roads.

        • @anon987@lemmy.world
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          -11 year ago

          AI cars already cause drastically less accidents. And the accidents they do cause are overwhelmingly minor.

          • @Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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            11 year ago

            People hate it when an accident happens and there’s no one to blame. Now it’s still on the driver’s responsibility but that’s not always going to be the case. We’re never reaching zero traffic deaths even with self driving cars that are a hundred times better than the best human driver.

  • @Nobody@lemmy.world
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    371 year ago

    Beware, terminally incompetent interns everywhere. Doing something incredibly damaging to your company over social media on your first day is officially a job that’s been taken by AI.

  • Otter
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    171 year ago

    I don’t really understand this headline

    The bot made it? So why was it promoted as trending?

  • IninewCrow
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    1 year ago

    Same similiar thing happened with major newspapers about 100 / 150 years ago … governments realized that if any one group or company had control over all the information without regulation, businesses will quickly figure out ways to monetize information for the benefit of those with all the money and power. They then had to figure out how to start regulating newspapers and news media in order to maintain some sort of control and sanity to the entire system.

    But like the newspapers of old … no one will do anything about all this until it causes a major crisis or causes a terrible event … or events.

    In the meantime … big corporations controlling 99% of all media and news information will stay unregulated or regulated as little as possible until terrible things happen and society breaks down.

    • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      11 year ago

      By the way, yeah, the LLMs of that time looked like some poor guy writing for pennies articles about astrology or how Redskins are cool but should be exterminated, or inventing fake animals and plants every time.

      I’ve sort of mixed L. F. Baum’s biography with Marek from “Good soldier Shveyk”, but many consider Marek to be a portrait of author himself.

  • yeehaw
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    -281 year ago

    Not to defend elon here but so what? Is it his job?

      • @h3rm17@sh.itjust.works
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        -241 year ago

        Nah, it’s a bit like government. Its only his responsability if it is no one elses responsability. Like, they can have the most corrupt gabinets, most presidents do not resign/abdicate, whatever the word is.

          • @h3rm17@sh.itjust.works
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            -71 year ago

            Ok, you just downvote and say no, but no explanation given. In my gov several cases of corruption arised during the last couple of years, and way more in the past. They affect high ranking ministers, and yet the oresident does not resign. Same with companies, they get paid the most, do the least, claim it is vecause they have “lots of responsabilities” but still never pay the price

            • @maynarkh@feddit.nl
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              51 year ago

              Corporations are completely authoritarian, while most governments are not, or at least not completely. If there really is a “rogue engineer”, Musk can very easily fire them. Even if there was, it’s his responsibility to organize a company in such a way that this cannot happen, with people having oversight over other people.

              He is very clearly failing to do any of that.

            • @baru@lemmy.world
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              21 year ago

              but no explanation given

              You didn’t explain, so why should I? I did see you made things up.

    • @cygon@lemmy.world
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      61 year ago

      I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

      So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.

    • @Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      71 year ago

      “Somebody I don’t like said something bad about one of the worlds richest oligarchs therefore all criticism of him is invalid”

      The guy has enough money to protect himself from bad criticism and address narratives he doesn’t like; he doesn’t need sad pathetic losers defending him on the internet like he’s a defenseless baby.

      • @Ginger666@lemmy.world
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        -21 year ago

        You people will take a statement, then do mental gymnastics in your mind to make it fit your retarded narrative.

        Holy fuck

        • Cris
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          1 year ago

          I mean, he’s responsible for a pretty heinous thing in this instance… It’s not like people are pissing their pants over nothing.

          If your company publishes an explicitly fabricated headline stating there was a missile attack that never happened, generated by ai, and then presented to a ton of people on a major social media site, criticism is pretty deserved… (≖_≖ )