(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Musk's new genius idea: Racist AI chatbot for babies [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-07-21
Over the weekend, right-wing billionaire Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, would be developing a kid-friendly version of its antisemitic chatbot, Grok. Masterful gambit, sir. There’s just no question that what parents want their children exposed to on the internet is a mercurial bit of software trained on posts from white supremacists.
Like so many other Musk announcements and promises, this one has no real details. So the deployment of Baby Grok—that’s really what Musk is calling it—could be on the same timeline as his plans to colonize Mars, an ever-shifting timeline that is out of touch with reality. Instead, it will likely be more in the vein of Musk’s plans for fully self-driving cars. Musk has been promising for years and years that completely autonomous Teslas were right around the corner, something he’s continued to push despite pesky little things like fatal crashes.
Meanwhile, Musk is apparently imagining a world where parents will be thrilled to give their children unfettered access to Grok, which recently made headlines by spouting so much Nazi rhetoric that xAI seemingly had to shut it down. Musk’s explanation as to why Grok descended into the sort of gutter racism usually reserved for X’s non-bot denizens is that Grok was “too eager to please and be manipulated.”
However, blaming Grok’s users ignores Musk’s own actions in reportedly altering Grok’s prompts to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.”
Elon Musk attends news conference with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30.
Why wouldn’t Musk feel emboldened, however? Just a couple of days after Grok crashed and burned, xAI got a sweetheart contract with the government worth up to $200 million. According to a Department of Defense press release, Musk’s AI efforts will help the government “address critical national security challenges,” a thing which seems unlikely to happen if Musk’s chatbots are so easily tipped over into breathtaking racism and violent rhetoric based on the tone of user prompts.
It also isn’t clear how Baby Grok would be insulated from input by just the sort of users that make up much of Musk’s base. The white supremacists hanging out on X aren’t likely to steer clear of trying to push Baby Grok into just the same type of statements made by Baby Grok’s full-grown … big brother? Father? Creator? The familial relationship between Grok and Baby Grok is, as of yet, unexplained. Probably best not to inquire, given Musk’s creepy pro-natalist views.
To be fair, maybe the time is right for a chatbot directed at children. Congress just gave Trump a big assist in his war on credible information, defunding public broadcasting, including PBS. The administration also froze, without explanation, $6 billion on funds appropriated for after-school programs. A lawsuit from 24 Democratic states to restore funding was met with silence, but after 10 Republican senators whined about it, the administration has restored about $1.4 billion. The fact that this is hailed as a victory shows how far things have fallen in the Trump era, where Trump releasing what still amounts to less than one-third of congressionally appropriated funds is cause for celebration rather than consternation.
Schools starved for teaching material acceptable to the administration or those in states that support the conservative goal of eradicating history in favor of partisan slop can now partner with PragerU, a right-wing propaganda platform. Education Secretary Linda McMahon is so down with PragerU’s unique educational tools—such as AI-slopified pictures of Founding Father John Adams saying that “facts do not care about our feelings”—that she made sure to attend PragerU’s launch event for its latest historical-revisionist series, “Road to Liberty.”
Kids don’t need Big Bird or accurate American history or anything else, really. They can just ask Baby Grok for information, which will no doubt be totally true and accurate and not at all Nazi-adjacent. Wouldn’t want the brave new world of chatbots declaring themselves “MechaHitler” to leave the youth behind.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/21/2334477/-Musk-s-new-genius-idea-Racist-AI-chatbot-for-babies?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_8&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
