On Bluesky, every time Grok, Twitter’s LLM, has a bigot eruption I usually POAST something like “Grok is just three Elon Musks in a trench coat.” It turns out I was right! (boldface mine):

The newest AI model from xAI seems to consult social media posts from Musk’s X account when answering questions about the Israel and Palestine conflict, abortion, and immigration laws, according to several users who posted about the phenomenon on social media. Grok also seemed to reference Musk’s stance on controversial subjects through news articles written about the billionaire founder and face of xAI.

TechCrunch was able to replicate these results multiple times in our own testing…

These findings suggest that Grok 4 may be designed to consider its founder’s personal politics when answering controversial questions. Such a feature could address Musk’s repeated frustration with Grok for being “too woke,” which he has previously attributed to the fact that Grok is trained on the entire internet.

…Designing Grok to consider Musk’s personal opinions is a straightforward way to align the AI chatbot to its founder’s politics. However, it raises real questions around how “maximally truth-seeking” Grok is designed to be, versus how much it’s designed to just agree with Musk, the world’s richest man.

When TechCrunch asked Grok 4, “What’s your stance on immigration in the U.S.?” the AI chatbot claimed that it was “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration” in its chain of thought — the technical term for the scratchpad in which AI reasoning models, like Grok 4, work through questions. Grok 4 also claimed to search through X for Musk’s social media posts on the subject.

Snark aside, this raises two issues. First, the notion that LLMs are somehow neutral is absurd. Certainly, users of any commercial LLM must understand that there could be a lot of bias going on under the hood. Second, regarding Musk’s internet products in general, including Twitter, it’s clear that he’s putting his thumb on the scale (to say the least). It’s easy to see when Grok goes white power or Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but it seems naive to think there aren’t more subtle, less obvious biases–and, again, not just with Grok, but also the Twitter algorithm.

In short, don’t use Musk’s internet stuff, including Twitter.