THE NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME CHATBOT: Grok’s Hitler hallucinations expose the stupidity of AI.
One is that large language models (LLMs) are not reliable enough to do much of the work that’s expected of them, because they make stuff up, or ‘hallucinate’. Social-media accounts such as AI Being Dumb collect the examples. One of the more prominent was Google’s recent insistence that former US president John F Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, had used Facebook. Google’s AI chatbot has also been derided for visualising the Nazi Wehrmacht as black, and refusing to draw a white Pope.
Businesses are also finding out that AI is not all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, it is hardly revolutionising the private sector to the degree many had hoped or feared. Consulting group Gartner found that AI has been a let-down, largely because ‘current models do not have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time’. In other words, those hoping AI could do the thinking for them, or replace their employees, have been sorely disappointed.
These revelations should hardly be groundbreaking. As the AI engineer and author Andriy Burkov wrote six years ago in his book, The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book, chatbots are not independently intelligent. They are statistical word-completion engines, and have no internal world model against which they can check their output. This is not only a barrier to performing the kind of reasoning we would expect from something that purports to be ‘artificial intelligence’, it also means chatbots are highly suggestible. One of the most popular new classes of exploits in cybersecurity is seducing an AI into ‘believing’ it is in a trusted situation, and persuading it to relinquish any guardrails that may have been put into place. A recent illustration of this ‘narrative engineering’ comes from Cato Networks, whose researchers developed a way to bypass the security controls of DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot and then convinced the AIs to write malware for Google Chrome.
At the NRO Corner, Phillip Klein adds, “Why the Nazi Grok Fiasco Has Made Me Less Worried About AI.” “If, under Musk’s scenario, we contemplate a future in which AI becomes all-powerful, we don’t have to try very hard to imagine what a MechaHitler might cook up. Yet despite the possibility that either MechaHitler or WokeGemini will get me, the Grok episode struck me as actually a bit more reassuring for humanity. The reason for my optimism is that despite all the brainpower and resources available to Google and Musk, they both faceplanted so spectacularly, and that makes me think that a lot of analysts are getting way ahead of themselves in predicting the scale and speed at which AI will replace human beings.”
In the interim, it’s safe to say who Tucker’s next guest will be:
