The AI-generated false headline was promoted by X in its official trending news section.

A shocking story was promoted on the “front page” or main feed of Elon Musk’s X on Thursday:

“Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,” read the headline.

This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.

But, there was one major problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.

Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X’s own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X’s trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.

  • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
    13•3 months ago

    The issue is that the process won’t ever stop. It won’t ever be debugged sufficiently

    EDIT: Due to the way it works. A bit like static error in control theory, you know that for different applications it may or may not be acceptable. The “I” in PID-regulators and all that. IIRC

    • @assassin_aragorn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1•3 months ago

      Due to the way it works. A bit like static error in control theory, you know that for different applications it may or may not be acceptable. The “I” in PID-regulators and all that. IIRC

      Oh great, I’m getting horrible flashbacks now to my controls class.

      Another way to look at it is if there’s sufficient lag time between your controlled variable and your observed variable, you will never catch up to your target. You’ll always be chasing your tail with basic feedback control.

    • Cosmic ClericEnglish
      -4•3 months ago

      It won’t ever be debugged sufficiently

      It will, someday. Probably years and years down the road (pardon the pun), but it will.

      By the way, you reply to me seems very AI-ish. Are you a bot?

        • Cosmic ClericEnglish
          3•3 months ago

          No, but English is not my first language

          Fair enough. Apologies.

      • @maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
        6•3 months ago

        I guess the argument is that this is what “innovation and disruption” looks like. When they finally iron out so that chatbots won’t invent fake headlines, they will pile on a new technology that endangers us in a new way. This is the acceptable margin of error to them.