Nazi Chatbots? ANOTHER Horseman of the Apocalypse?
Some people miss news like this if they’re not terminally online, as I am. The latest out of The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, a.k.a. X, a.k.a. The Hell Site, a.k.a. The Bird Site, Reichposting, or whatever you want to call it, is that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot seems to have gone off the rails— at Musk’s own behest- and it got really, really weird. Ranging from graphically describing a brutal rape fantasy involving Will Stancil to sparking an international incident with Turkey for talking shit about Erdogan, Grok termed itself “MechaHitler.”
Uh, what’s going on here?
Well, normally, we might think that something horrific had gone off the rails. But here in the declining American Empire, it was just Tuesday, perhaps. A friend speculated that the chatbot might have been reprogrammed since Grok had been pissing off a lot of conservatives by fact-checking them– conservatives hate to be fact-checked when they spout bald-faced lies about how immigrants commit more crimes, for example, or when they say that climate change isn’t real.
One of the hallmarks of reactionary politics is to countermand truth by inventing a new truth. The “Big Lie,” for example– the repeatedly-parroted bullshit that the right wing has been preoccupied with since even before the 2020 presidential election- is following the Nazi playbook that all you have to do to create a new truth is to tell a big lie and keep repeating the lie until people believe it.
We can assume– based on oodles of data points thus far- that refactoring the notion of truth itself is fundamental to the success of Elon Musk’s attempt to create a new America Party, which will likely be an economically neoliberal, socially reactionary one– that is, at least until he loses interest in it while in his next k-hole.
One thing that is for damn sure, though? The ADL, having sold its soul for a few pieces of access to right-wing extremists who purport to Love The Jews, is going to have a really hard time avoiding condemning the guy this time around. For the ADL to actually condemn real, honest-to-G-d Nazis in 2025, you know it has to be bad! Have a great Wednesday, everyone.
