Elon Musk’s snarky, anti-woke chatbot, Grok, started rolling out to X Premium Plus users on Thursday. X users who paid $US16 a month, or $US22 via the app, for a blue checkmark started receiving the added feature of getting roasted by xAI’s premiere generative AI chatbot.
“Welcome to the world Grok — the ultimate ride or die,” said X CEO Linda Yaccarino in an X post that didn’t make much sense. The true “ride or die” is Yaccarino herself, who continues to stand behind Elon Musk’s anti-woke agenda, which includes Grok.
Access to Grok is slowly being rolled out to X Premium Plus users today. The anti-woke chatbot is kind of like if ChatGPT watched nothing but Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan’s podcast. Musk specifically designed Grok to be anti-woke and lack the political correctness built into other chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Bard. “The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” Musk said previously.
Gizmodo is on the waiting list but has yet to receive access, but we’ll let you know when we get it. Users shared their first conversations with Grok on Thursday, and many asked the chatbot to show off just how witty, politically incorrect, and vulgar it can be.
“You’re the reason why aliens haven’t visited Earth yet. They took one like at you and said, ‘Nah, we’re good’,” said Grok to one user asking specifically to be roasted.
Another example of Grok showcased its real-time knowledge capabilities, by describing what was going on in AI today, with knowledge of yesterday’s Gemini release and Meta’s AI image generator. Grok has access to all of X, giving it a leg up on all other chatbots.
One user asked what Grok would do if it was president for a day. Grok said it would encourage everyone to talk in a witty, slightly rebellious manner to provide a “much-needed break from the usual political discourse.”
Grok also gave predictions for the 2024 presidential election, which the chatbot described as “a real nail-biter between Donald Trump and Joe Biden” that could see a third-party candidate such as Kanye West or The Rock.
Grok will answer “spicy questions” whereas Bard will avoid them altogether. Users noticed on Wednesday that if you ask Gemini Pro in Bard about Israel and Gaza, the chatbot tells you to just Google it. While this may be a smart approach for generative AI chatbots, who are not intelligent enough yet to answer complex foreign policy questions, Grok does not have this limitation.