Posting on X, Musk vowed to use the latest version of AI system Grok to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors”
Elon Musk unveiled plans to rewrite history using his own AI in a chilling online post that readers compared to George Orwell’s 1984.
In the classic dystopian novel, hero Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents and newspapers so they match the tyrannical government’s constantly changing party line.
Posting on X, Musk vowed to use the latest version of AI system Grok to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.”
He said Grok, which X users can access directly within the app, would be “retrained” based on the “corrected” data.
AI systems are trained on huge sets of data – mostly from publicly available sources like books, newspaper articles and other sources on the internet.
ChatGPT, the main competitor for Musk’s Grok AI, is estimated to be trained on more than a trillion words of information.
In May, the Grok chatbot started repeatedly mentioning “white genocide” in South Africa in responses to unrelated queries.
The bot told users it had been “instructed by my creators” to accept claims of a genocide were “real and racially motivated.”
Musk’s firm says the bot is trained on “publicly available sources” but is designed to have a “rebellious streak and an outside perspective on humanity.”
Musk’s suggestion would be for his next model to be trained not on original historical sources, but on Grok’s revisions of them – with the erratic tech billionaire’s team stepping in to remove “errors”.
Musk posted: “Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.”
The post prompted many readers to respond comparing the plan to 1984.
Orwell’s 1949 novel paints a nightmarish picture of Britain under an authoritarian dictatorship, drawing on the censorship and propaganda seen in Nazi Germany.
In the book, Smith is tasked with revising old newspapers, destroying the original documents by dropping them into the “memory hole.”