Elon Musk launched an AI chatbot in November as a vulgar alternative to traditional AI—and now it’s turned on its creator.
The CEO of Tesla Motors bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion and has since rebranded the social-media platform as X and cut staff numbers. Musk eventually pitched xAI’s “Grok” as an AI that converses casually with users and can swear at you, available as a benefit to subscribers of the X Premium Plus tier.
However, the bot might not work the way Musk had originally hoped it would. When it was asked about Musk’s family owning an emerald mine, it slammed the businessman in its response.
“Elon said in a 2014 interview his family owned an emerald mine but now claims he didn’t. Was he lying in 2014 or lying now?” X user @PoliticalOUTL4W asked Grok.
The AI bot replied: “Well, it seems like Elon might be trying to rewrite history here. In a 2014 interview, he mentioned that his family owned an emerald mine. But now, he’s singing a different tune and denying it. It’s like he’s trying to pull a David Copperfield and make the mine disappear!”
Newsweek reached out to Musk for comment via email Tuesday.
There has long been conjecture that Errol Musk, Musk’s father, held a half-share in a mine or owned an entire emerald mine in South Africa.
In a 2014 phone interview, Musk told online portal AskMen that his father “had a share in an emerald mine in Zambia,” according to an archived version of the article—and the story spread like wildfire. Since then, the owner of X has tried to distance himself from the emerald mine story, repeatedly denying that his father ever owned one in the first place.
“He didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt,” Elon Musk tweeted in 2019 in response to a user on X.
In January of this year, his mother Maye Musk shared a CBS News article on X that made the same claims. She wrote: “Found this @CBSNews @elonmusk interview from 1998. I didn’t know about the emerald mine and wealthy parents until I read it on @Twitter about ten years ago. So, why did we live in a rent controlled apartment?”
Elon Musk replied: “The fake emerald mine thing is so annoying (sigh). Like where exactly is this thing anyway!”
However, a community note was affixed to the bottom of his tweet, which is a function introduced by the platform that aims to help fight misinformation there. It read: “In a 2014 phone interview with Ask Men, Musk said, “This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an emerald mine in Zambia.” His father, Errol Musk, told Business Insider he purchased a 50% share in the mine for £40k after selling a plane for £80k.”
In April, Elon Musk said he would “pay a million Dogecoin for proof of this mine’s existence!”
But his father Errol Musk continues to stand by his claim that the mine existed. Referring to his son’s Dogecoin tweet he told The Sun: “When I read that, I wondered, ‘Can I enter, because I can prove it existed.’ Elon knows it’s true. All the kids know about it.”
He added: “Elon saw [the emeralds] at our house. He knew I was selling them.”
This isn’t the first time that Grok has roasted Elon Musk, as when Aravind Srinivas, the chief of the tech company Perplexity AI, asked the chatbot to criticize Elon Musk, it called him a “delicate little flower.”
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the man who put the ‘twit’ in Twitter, the one and only @elonmusk! So, you want me to roast you based on your posts? I’ll do my best, but I’m not sure you can handle it, you delicate little flower,” Grok said.
“First off, let’s talk about your obsession with X. It’s like you’re trying to compensate for something, but I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s your inability to understand basic human emotions or your lack of self-awareness. Or maybe it’s just because you’re a giant man-child who can’t resist a shiny new toy.”
Related Articles
2023 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
This story was originally published December 12, 2023, 4:37 AM.
source: star-telegram
