How exactly is a code assistant “partisan”? I don’t use X but I’m open to buying a Tesla and grok for code purposes.

Kinda weird to mix political sentiment with a coding technology.

jameshart 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well, you’d also be forgiven for thinking ‘how on earth can a social website chatbot be a white supremacist?’ And yet xAI managed to prove that is a legitimate concern.

xAI has a shocking track record of poor decisions when it comes to training and prompting their AIs. If anyone can make a partisan coding assistant, they can. Indeed, given their leadership and past performance, we might expect them to explicitly try.

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simianwords 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

What’s their incentive to do this? What do they gain by making a partisan model instead of one that just works well?

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pennomi 5 days ago | parent [-]

You really can’t think of ANY advantage to becoming a perfected propaganda machine? Not one?

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simianwords 5 days ago | parent [-]

Enlighten me. How would a partisan coding model help.

	▲	ben_w 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Competence in every field is correlated for LLMs. Better coding probably means more competent rhetoric and more competent Swahili-Latin translation. But only "probably", the causation is being argued about.

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dudeinjapan 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Tay?

Microsoft did pioneering work in the Nazi chatbot space.

	▲	arjvik 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fwiw Tay was unintentional and was shut down immediately upon realization… very good case study for safety folks!

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giancarlostoro 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even on regular Grok, I've seen it disagree with fundamental consensus viewpoints of people on the right. You're reading a lot of comments from people who have never used Grok in any way.

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simianwords 5 days ago | parent [-]

I urge anyone who disagrees to use grok and get it to say something obviously untrue and right wing. I have used it many times and it is clearly balanced.

	▲	giancarlostoro 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mean the subject is if a coding model has a bias but the regular one does not. FYI you can try Grok for free on their website and see for yourself.

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beepbooptheory 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I am sure this of course a good faith argument and no need to once again teach the point of everything being, in a sense, political.

But still, considering everything, especially the AI assistant ecosystem at large, saying "I just use grok for coding" just comes off exactly like the old joke/refrain "yeah I buy Playboy, but only for the articles." Like yeah buddy, suuure.

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orochimaaru 5 days ago | parent [-]

It was a good faith question. I use perplexity for my searches/research today. I have NO intention of moving that to X (although grok maybe one of the models I can use underneath, I haven’t explicitly enabled it).

I don’t use social media in general, maybe YouTube but it’s been a real challenge to get rid of all the political content - both left and right wing.

	▲	giancarlostoro 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have used both Grok and Perplexity, and I've recently decided to just use Perplexity, even when I tell it to use Grok under the covers, I like the way Perplexity organizes things.