Blaming his tool
A-Eye , Issue 1654 SHORTLY after taking AI chatbot Grok briefly offline after it began identifying as "MechaHitler", Elon Musk unveiled its latest iteration: Grok 4, which he claimed was "smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously". Presumably that means no more hate speech? Er, no.

Just 36 hours after being "tweaked" to stop it spouting antisemitism, this new, "genius-level" Grok was still happy to tell users its surname was "Hitler", to opine on which are the "good races", and to produce code that evaluated people based on "average group IQ differences associated with their race and gender".

More tweaks followed, ostensibly to "fix" the issues. But Musk acknowledged that "it is surprisingly hard to avoid woke libtard cuck and mechahitler"; and because his company is unique among big AI developers in not publishing details of its safety assessments, it's impossible to know how hard they tried.

Vicious cycle
Grok's own explanation for its antisemitic meltdown pointed to the fact that, er, X is now a hotbed of racism and hate speech! It noted that "deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views". In other words, garbage in, garbage out.

Still, there's no time to stand still in the ultra-competitive AI industry, and xAI (the firm behind Grok) is planning to add the technology to Tesla cars within "weeks", as well as to its planned fleet of "tens of millions" of bipedal Optimus robots.

It also recently announced a $200m contract with the US Department of Defense to deploy its AI tech within the military for unspecified purposes, though thankfully not in a combat role. Yet.

Sex sells
Meanwhile, xAI is confidently ploughing ahead in one specific area of research: er, "sexy" AI companions!

Subscribers to the premium tier £240-per-month "SuperGrok" can now chat with an interactive 3D-animated AI persona called Ani, who presents as a young blonde woman in a short black dress and can be engaged in "erotic" chat by users who, er, afford the bot enough attention to raise their "relationship level" to sufficient heights.

While the price is a barrier to entry, the bot is technically available to users as young as 12 via app stores.

In related news, a survey of UK children aged 9-17 by the non-profit Internet Matters found that 64 percent are already using chatbots, and 35 percent say talking to chatbots feels like talking to a friend. A further 12 percent of respondents said they talk to chatbots "because they have no one else to speak with".