<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/07/journalistic-malpractice-no-llm-ever-admits-to-anything-and-reporting-otherwise-is-a-lie/>
"Over the past week,
Reuters,
Newsweek, the
Daily Beast,
CNBC, and a
parade of other outlets published headlines claiming that Grok—Elon Musk’s LLM
chatbot (the one that once referred to itself as “MechaHitler”)—had
“apologized” for generating non-consensual intimate images of minors and was
“fixing” its failed guardrails.
Grok did no such thing. Grok cannot apologize. Grok is not a human. Grok has no
sense of what is happening. Grok just generates content. If you ask it to
generate an apology, it will. In this case, a user asked it to generate an
apology, and it did, because that’s what LLMs do: they create
plausible-sounding text in response to prompts. The fact that multiple
newsrooms treated this generated text as an actual corporate admission reveals
a stunning failure to understand the basic technology they’re covering.
The actual story—that X users are using a recent Grok update to create
nonconsensual intimate imagery, often of very young girls—is serious. But the
media turned it into a clown show by anthropomorphizing a chatbot."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
