Elon Musk says his artificial intelligence company xAI will retrain its AI model, Grok, on a new knowledge base free of “garbage” and “uncorrected data” — by first using it to rewrite history.
In an X post on Saturday, Musk said the upcoming Grok 3.5 model will have “advanced reasoning” and wanted it to be used “to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.”
He said the model would then retrain on the new knowledge set, claiming there was “far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.”
Musk’s latest fight against “woke”
Musk has long claimed that rival AI models, such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, a firm he co-founded, are biased and omit information that is not politically correct.
For years, Musk has looked to shape products to be free from what he considers to be damaging political correctness and has aimed to make Grok what he calls “anti-woke.”
He also relaxed Twitter’s content and misinformation moderation when he took over in 2022, which saw the platform flooded with unchecked conspiracy theories, extremist content and fake news, some of which was spread by Musk himself.
Musk aimed to fight the tide of misinformation by implementing a “Community Notes” feature, allowing X users to debunk or add context to posts that show prominently under offending posts.
Criticism levelled at Grok’s retraining
Musk’s post attracted condemnation from his critics, including from Gary Marcus, an AI startup founder and New York University professor emeritus of neural science who compared the billionaire’s plan to a dystopia.
“Straight out of 1984,” Marcus wrote on X. ”You couldn’t get Grok to align with your own personal beliefs so you are going to rewrite history to make it conform to your views.”
Bernardino Sassoli de’ Bianchi, a University of Milan professor of logic and science philosophy, wrote on LinkedIn that he was “at a loss of words to comment on how dangerous” Musk’s plan is.
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“When powerful billionaires treat history as malleable simply because outcomes don’t align with their beliefs, we’re no longer dealing with innovation — we’re facing narrative control,” he added. “Rewriting training data to match ideology is wrong on every conceivable level.”
Musk’s call for “facts” brings conspiracy theories, falsehoods
As part of his effort to overhaul Grok, Musk called on X users to share “divisive facts” to train the bot, specifying they should be “politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
The replies saw a variety of conspiracy theories and debunked extremist claims, including Holocaust distortion, debunked vaccine misinformation, racist pseudoscientific claims regarding intelligence and climate change denial.
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