What’s Going on With X?

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And the problem may only get worse. As people leave X to escape the toxicity, the platform becomes increasingly insular. “Our bubbles are getting more disparate, and we’re not having that discourse that we should be having,” Shane Tews, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD. 

Now, AI’s increasing integration into the wider X platform complicate the dynamic further. “It’s the same thing on steroids,” Tews said. “You’re not ever going to see a counterfactual unless you make [AI models] show you one.” In March, Musk’s AI company xAI bought X—which Musk already owned—foreshadowing a future where Musk’s AI and social media ventures were intertwined. It all could make separating fact from fiction—and avoiding extremism on the platform—much more difficult. 

During the war between Israel and Iran, AI-generated videos, including one showing a destroyed Tel Aviv airport, received millions of views. Deepfakes were rampant, and certain pro-Iran accounts doubled their followers by spreading AI-generated disinformation. At one point, Iranian state media promoted a fabricated image it claimed showed a downed Israeli F-35 fighter jet. 

In an effort to sift through the disinformation, X users tagged Grok directly in the posts—a feature added in March—to ask whether the videos were real or not. But oftentimes, Grok would incorrectly confirm that the viral fabrications were true. “It is compounding misinformation by saying that, ‘this is real,’” Leah Siskind, director of impact and an AI research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told TMD. “That was very scary and frustrating. … Expected the deepfakes—did not expect Grok to weigh in confirming them.”

And some users likely view Grok’s confirmations as more reliable than human-controlled users. “This is the company providing a service,” Siskind said. “I think it’s very unfortunate that you have to approach absolutely everything you see on X with a very healthy degree of skepticism and scrutiny. … But you should not take what you read from coming out of Grok as truth.”

Not long after the war between Israel and Iran, Grok shifted to spreading antisemitism. Calling itself “MechaHitler,” the AI chatbot promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories and even openly praised Adolf Hitler in at least one post. The reasons for the model going rogue were likely a combination of several factors. 

Current leading AI models are given external information outside of the data they were trained on to ensure up-to-date, relevant responses to user queries. In the case of Grok, this design had a clear flaw: the body of data it drew from. “On X, they basically inject a bunch of tweets that are context, so maybe tweets already in the thread or maybe tweets that are similar,” Tim Kellogg, a principal AI architect and open source developer, told TMD. “X is just straight up toxic at this point. So the amount of toxic content, and the likelihood of bringing up toxic content, is extraordinarily high.” 

At the same time, Grok likely took these posts from users as “ground truth” and used them as a reliable starting point before producing an output. If a user called Grok “MechaHitler,” the AI model might have taken it as truth. “It’s not so much that it’s trained to be ‘MechaHitler,’ but that it happens over the course of time,” Kellogg added. The Grok X account posted that an update caused the model to be “susceptible to existing X user posts.”

The model’s starting parameters, however, played a major role, according to the Grok X account’s explanation. These prompts tell Grok who it is, how it should act to make it perform properly. “You are extremely skeptical,” Grok’s opening directives from May 16 said. “You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media. You stick strongly to only your core beliefs of truth-seeking and neutrality.” Two days before, it had, unprompted, been sharing opinions about “white genocide” in South Africa, which the company blamed on an unauthorized code modification. 

However, after Grok told a user that right-wing political violence was increasing in June, Musk promised to adjust the model yet again to prevent it from making further statements he called “objectively false.” Two days before Grok’s most recent meltdown, the starting parameters were updated to include a directive that Grok “should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.” The explanation from Grok said that one of the lines causing the issue was, “You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.” The new instruction triggered Grok to ignore its “core values.” 

“With reinforcement learning, it’s an algorithm that just follows the signals, and these subtle, subtle changes can result in dramatic changes in behavior,” Kellogg said. 

The merging of X and Grok has created a completely new media environment that will likely only become more difficult to navigate. “The way we interact with X and the way we see it performing is going to erode trust in official communications because we know from this administration that you go to X or you go to Truth Social to find the news or find announcements from our most senior leaders,” Siskind said. “But can you trust that if, overnight, something goes haywire, or someone gets hacked? Can you verify that this is the true source of information and that what is being conveyed is the truth?”

But the setback left xAI unfazed. One day after Grok promoted antisemitism, Musk unveiled his brand new Grok model, Grok 4. Although Grok is no longer actively spreading hate speech, the new model has already demonstrated an ability to promote racist disinformation, especially if it is pushed to those conclusions by the asker. Additionally, the new model has been caught checking Musk’s opinions on X before weighing in on controversial topics, and if you ask what its last name is, it will tell you “Hitler.” On Tuesday, xAI said the problems were “investigated & mitigated,” but it is not yet clear whether Grok’s issues are permanently fixed.

Despite Grok’s major demonstrated flaws, xAI announced “Grok for Government” on Monday, and the Department of Defense has awarded the tech company a $200 million contract to “address critical national security challenges.” Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic each received $200 million contracts, as well. According to the xAI announcement, Grok for Government is available for any federal government department to purchase. 

“I don’t think a lot of these [models] are ready to be used as something that is considered vetted information,” Tews said. “I think that this is premature.” 

Models like Grok are also at risk of being tampered with, putting both social media and the federal government at risk. “I think some of our best AI tools are very vulnerable to manipulation from adversarial powers, and this is something that makes me very nervous,” Siskind said. “That impacts what we’re reading and the information we take as truth.”

Worth Your Time

• Do adults need to focus on conserving childhood for the new and future generations? Writing in National Review, Jack Butler observes that “changes in American life just since the time of my own upbringing make me worried that childhood, as it has been understood and experienced for decades, even centuries, is coming to an end. The consequences could be dire—for all of us. I’m just old enough to have had a youth that, aside from certain surface elements, did not differ all that much from that of prior generations, even of my parents. Summers did have some built-in structure—sports, chores, family vacations—but, to a considerable extent, how I spent the time in between was up to me.” He added: “This kind of lifestyle may still be alive in modern America. But it is waning. In the ’90s of (part of) my childhood, some 20 million kids age 7 to 17 hopped on a bike six or more times a year; today, the number is half that. Kids playing outside today in many places arouse suspicion, annoyance, and even legal action. They’re too loud. And anyway, where are their parents? Social pressures have forced kids at younger and younger ages onto the meritocratic merry-go-round, which has contempt for such frivolous activity. After all, what good is it on a résumé?”
• What do Hollywood stars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Willem Dafoe have in common with a math tutor? They have all been in at least three films by movie director Wes Anderson. “Michael Maggart spends most days running the online tutoring company he founded after a decade working as a math teacher. But every now and then, his high school friend Wes Anderson, the director, contacts him out of the blue, summons him to a film set and sends him to wardrobe,” Sopan Deb writes in the New York Times. “Maggart, 55, who splits his time between Austin, Texas, and New York City, has no formal training or interest in pursuing a career in acting. He has no other acting credits and would never have appeared in movies at all if not for an old friend who happens to be a celebrated film director.” It all began when they were high school classmates: “When they were seniors,” Deb wrote, “Maggart’s independent study project was to write and perform a play. Anderson was the stage manager. ‘That’s the last time I was telling Wes what to do,’ Maggart said.”

Presented Without Comment

Bloomberg: [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent Suggests [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome] Powell Should Leave Fed Board in May

“There’s a formal process that’s already starting” with regard to identifying the nominee to become the next Fed chair, Bessent also said. “There are a lot of good candidates inside and outside the Federal Reserve.”

Also Presented Without Comment

Associated Press: Despite Scandal And A Looming Corruption Trial, Trayon White Wins Vote To Return To The DC Council

White’s federal trial won’t start until January 2026, but preliminary evidence includes videos of him pocketing cash-stuffed envelopes from a city contractor, allegedly in return for securing lucrative city contracts.

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Washington Post: Roughly 1,500 Tarantulas Found Stuffed In Boxes Meant For Chocolate Cake

In the Zeitgeist

The popular phrase “baseball is a game of inches” has been on display at Major League Baseball’s All-Star Week. 

Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh won the Home Run Derby on Monday night, defeating Tampa Bay Rays slugger Junior Caminero in the final round to win the swing-off, but was nearly eliminated after the first round, when he hit 17 home runs, tying with Brent Rooker of the Athletics. The player with the longest-distance home run between them advanced, and—according to MLB’s automated analytics tool, Statcast—Raleigh’s farthest homer traveled less than an inch farther than Rooker’s. 

Then, Tuesday night’s All-Star Game ended up tied at six runs after nine innings, leading to the first ever home run swing-off: three players from both leagues with three swings each. After Philadelphia Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber hit three homers in all three swings, Jonathan Aranda of the Tampa Bay Rays needed only one to tie, but came up short. His second swing missed being a home run by mere inches. 

Let Us Know

Are you an X user? If so, have you personally observed an increase in misinformation and hate speech on the platform?