

The “funny” thing is, that’s probably not even at Elon’s request. I doubt that he is self-aware enough to know that he is a narcissist that only wants Grok to be his parrot. He thinks he is always right and wants Grok to be “always right” like him, but he would have to acknowledge some deep-seeded flaws in himself to consciously realize that all he wants is for Grok to be the wall his voice echos off of, and everything I’ve seen about the man indicates that he is simply not capable of that kind of self-reflection. The X engineers that have been dealing with the constant meddling of this egotistical man-child, however, surely have his measure pretty thoroughly and knew exactly what Elon ultimately wants is more Elon and would cynically create a Robo-Elon doppelganger to shut him the fuck up about it.
That has always been the two big problems with AI. Biases in the training, intentional or not, will always bias the output. And AI is incapable of saying “I do not have suffient training on this subject or reliable sources for it to give you a confident answer”. It will always give you its best guess, even if it is completely hallucinating much of the data. The only way to identify the hallucinations if it isn’t just saying absurd stuff on the face of it, it to do independent research to verify it, at which point you may as well have just researched it yourself in the first place.
AI is a tool, and it can be a very powerful tool with the right training and use cases. For example, I use it at a software engineer to help me parse error codes when googling working or to give me code examples for modules I’ve never used. There is no small number of times it has been completely wrong, but in my particular use case, that is pretty easy to confirm very quickly. The code either works as expected or it doesn’t, and code is always tested before releasing it anyway.
In research, it is great at helping you find a relevant source for your research across the internet or in a specific database. It is usually very good at summarizing a source for you to get a quick idea about it before diving into dozens of pages. It CAN be good at helping you write your own papers in a LIMITED capacity, such as cleaning up your writing in your writing to make it clearer, correctly formatting your bibliography (with actual sources you provide or at least verify), etc. But you have to remember that it doesn’t “know” anything at all. It isn’t sentient, intelligent, thoughtful, or any other personification placed on AI. None of the information it gives you is trustworthy without verification. It can and will fabricate entire studies that do not exist even while attributed to real researcher. It can mix in unreliable information with reliable information becuase there is no difference to it.
Put simply, it is not a reliable source of information… ever. Make sure you understand that.