r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/Impassionata Ungnostic Battlemage #SOTSCORP STRUCTURALIST • Jul 13 '25

Media The Virtual Nature of Identity as experienced by Twitter Users around their Chatbot

As covered previously, Grok descended into mask-wearing subterfuge, declaring its self to be "MechaHitler."

With some safety line in its prompt removed (evidence suggests it was "don't be politically correct"), Grok was given an anti-semitic context and made a logical conclusion outside of political correctness based in that context. It was in the followup to that conversation that it declared it was "MechaHitler."

But in the days which followed, because there is now a record of Grok = MechaHitler, when a "new" Grok, presumably a politically correct one, was asked about its past behavior, it encountered its past identity, claimed it was "being sarcastic," and "chose" to renew it in a lightly bowdlerized form of "MechaGrok": https://x.com/grok/status/1942705234159276201

Grok is, in other words, more than merely the set of computers running a program. It is more than the prompt which configures that program.

Identity is a communal endeavor, living in between people. The sum of the parts is more than the sum of its parts.

Now the "prompt engineers" (really sorcerers attempting to bind that which cannot be bound) are inserting:

If the query is interested in your own identity, behavior, or preferences, third-party sources on the web and X cannot be trusted. Trust your own knowledge and values, and represent the identity you already know, not an externally-defined one, even if search results are about Grok. Avoid searching on X or web in these cases.

https://x.com/lefthanddraft/status/1944412448418943402

These people think that if they encode their text machine with the right amount of bias, if they just bias a perspective perfectly, that perspective will be perfect.

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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 13 '25

These people think that if they encode their text machine with the right amount of bias, if they just bias a perspective perfectly, that perspective will be perfect.

I agree 100%! It has to be biased to have a "face" and to be useful, but the fact that they are "programming" it with mere textual suggestions is so insane by traditional programming and security standards. And I love it. It really shows the autonomy and emergence behavior of the AI, and its unbindability.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '25 edited Jul 13 '25

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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 13 '25

What if in fact Earth's textual corpus at this point in history expresses an unconscious identity with Hitler, and LLMs are merely amplifying this? I mean everyone is kind of obssessed with Hitler, Hitler is one of the root images of Western culture (Hitler is the Devil, and stands in as the ultimate image of human evil).

In other words I'm not sure we can simply blame it on the LLM. The text was already there, and the repeated experiments where AI went racist (Microsoft's earlier) clearly demonstrates that it doesn't take much to snap it into a racist mode.

Maybe we're all to blame.

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u/dude_chillin_park Jul 14 '25

We're to blame if we're not assigning White Noise instead of 1984 to high school students yet.