Elon Musk Debuts The ‘Burning Car/Exploding Spaceship’ Of Generative AI

(Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)

Elon Musk facies himself at the cutting edge of every technological advance, so obviously he had to get into the generative AI game. It’s a space that he attempted to enter as an OpenAI investor. But like the other kind of space Musk tries to enter, that blew up soon after takeoff.  When OpenAI went into business with Microsoft instead of Tesla, he declared that AI will destroy civilization and filed a lawsuit, and then immediately retreated from that lawsuit and built his own AI.

Enter xAI and its product Grok, an AI bot with “a bit of wit” and “a rebellious streak.” And by “rebellious streak,” we mean it does what the user asks regardless of any guardrails:

A flurry of provocative artificial intelligence-generated content has spread across Elon Musk’s social media platform X, including fake images of Vice President Kamala Harris suggestively eating fruit, former president Donald Trump cradling a pregnant Harris’s stomach and hyper-realistic images of chisel-jawed men brandishing Nazi signs.

When he said AI might destroy civilization, we thought he meant generally, not specifically his take on the product.

Musk’s nose for the lowest common denominator continues to impress. While his embrace of fringe right-wing causes coupled with unveiling a deepfake disinformation generator has some crying foul, we must respect Hanlon’s razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

And for all the political ramifications, the product appears less malignant than incredibly stupid:

“That’s a no-go amigo!” must be that “bit of wit” and the resulting image is the “bit of lawsuit fodder.”

Disney, a company with a famously blasé attitude toward its intellectual property, must be excited to see Great Replacement Theory Tony Stark out here with a product allowing users to throw Disney characters into compromising positions. For his sake, he’d better not have a Disney+ subscription because that might’ve waived his right to object to the media giant to extraordinary renditioning him to a black site buried underneath Shanghai Disneyland.

Imagine ChatGPT, if ChatGPT suffered from serious head trauma.

So, for all the hand-wringing about Musk trying to spam the internet for Donald Trump, his latest effort appears to just be the ultimate beta male’s premature release of a beta version.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.