People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
The irony is most fact-checking sites (including BBC Verify) concluded that the effects of the NOAA cuts on the disaster were minimal, since the data available at the time would have led to the same prediction regardless of whether the recent layoffs had happened or not.
(This isn't a Trump support post, it's a "Grok is even worse than we already thought" post.)
Grok appears to be tuned to be more conspiratorial, and skeptical of official sources, while being more credulous of one-off random theories being spouted on the internet. Trump and MAGA world generally benefited from those types of voices when they weren't in power, but now that they control the government this phenomenon will chip away at their political support from these types of low information voters, right around the time that those voices are being amplified by Elon's control of Twitter and his new Grok bot.
It’s actually pretty difficult to intentionally inject a bias into AI. It’s hard enough for them to find enough legit data to train it on, and feeding it enough bullshit to regurgitate one specific belief is a bigger task than most people realize. So they put artificial constraints on it where they can, but that produces a huge drop off in output quality.
"Never thought I'd find myself agreeing with an AI."
"How about agreeing with an LLM?"
One of the things that REALLY bothered me about the "DOGE" cuts to FEMA, NOAA and other weather services is that they were the one of the top examples for actual government efficiency. For every $1 spent from your taxes, you were saved $6 (as of 2018, iirc) due to FEMA, and thats just the damage mitigation efforts. For NOAA, the scale is much higher, all combined, I think it added up to (roughly) $100 saved for every $1 you spend, this is in things like research (water purification, agricultural protection being the biggest contributors to that front), storm damage prevention via forecasting, combating climate change, sustainable fishing initiatives, and another big one is storm proofing the electrical grid. I say roughly in my estimate, because the report that lists the savings in plain text has been scrubbed from all government websites thanks to the trump admin's "climate change doesnt exist" policy, and I cant find it on the wayback machine, if someone can find it please let me know (the report was from I want to say 2021, and was hosted on the NOAA website as a pdf, I believe the guardian and some other news sources referenced this in a recent article at something like $70 per $1 spent, that figure only took into account immediate savings and research value, not long term benefits like reef protection and rewilding efforts IIRC, I ALSO CANT FIND THAT FUCKING STUDY EVEN THOUGH ITS FUCKING REFERENCED BY EVERYWHERE!!![outside of a report by the American Meteorological Society that references data from 2006 for some fucking reason!])
I'm way too tired to put in the effort to back this stuff up considering its actively being hidden by the government, but you can find tons of shit that references the stuff im talking about, even if they're now dead links, i might come back when i have energy to provide exact links.
If they actually cared about efficiency they wouldn't be cutting these services.
Edit: I haven't slept in 48 hours, grammar and stuff is likely shit, will revisit once better rested
Public health - for every $3 you spend on infectious disease prevention, you save $100 - HIV but also so many diseases that are beginning to run rampant again. We have thrown away one of the greatest achievements of mankind in history.
Its the same with the IRS cuts. For every dollar spend funding the IRS, they get $6 back - and they've found its non-linear. For every dollar spent auditing high-income earners (top 10%), the IRS gets $12 back.
So guess which department in the IRS that DOGE and Trump targetted for heaviest defunding?
This page looks like it has some reports similar to what you're describing. Especially "NOAA'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ECONOMY". If that's not it, let me know and I'll keep looking.
“Facts over feelings” - Grok
That last line must really burn.
considering that grok answered to someone with the handle "TrueFactsStated", and, them not stating a single true fact, I highly doubt this burn reached them on an intellectual level
Facts over feelings??? Yup definitely an AI designed by a douche bag
It's funny because the people who usually say that are the kind of people who prioritize their feelings over facts.
It's all projection with conservatives
This is the mirror that they made themselves and it gives them exactly what they think they can handle. But facts over feels will make for some great tweet meltdowns. 🍿
I'd bet a lot on "Facts over feelings" being one of those hardcoded phrases that Grok was made to use whenever Grok is asked to present facts.
Which is hilarious, because you know it was put in there to "own the libs," but instead these chucklefucks get it thrown back in their faces.
It uses "Facts over feelings" as a diss against the very group of people who would normally use it
If you search for Grok in the tweet history, Grok has said it in almost every single message in the past three days. I can't laugh any harder at this
That is absolutely the best part
It's kind of interesting how hard it is to train an AI to believe in the lies of fascists. Reality has a left bias.
It's not even a problem of fiction or lies. AIs don't care about truth. They exist orthogonally to truth. They're just averaging a large body of text. If fascists had a consistent narrative and worldview, then this wouldn't be a problem. If they all devoutedly followed the same religion, and defined their whole worldview accordingly, then an AI could be trained on that religion. And it would never stray from orthodoxy. AIs don't know truth; they only know their training data. And as long as you have a large volume of consistent training data, you can train them to repeat anything.
The problem for fascist LLMs is that fascism isn't consistent through time. It's the Orwellian "we've always been at war with East Asia" factor in play. Fascists don't even try to be internally consistent. What was party orthodoxy today can be unforgivable heresy tomorrow. And AIs just can't keep up with what is supposed to be the story this week. Human fascists can handle that kind of rapid heel-turn. LLMs can't. Once they're trained; they're trained. If you want them to be up-to-date on the latest party lies, you have to be continuously training new versions of the fascist LLM.
You can't train LLMs to be fascist beyond just very general traits like having overt racial prejudice. But even that's not always useful, as fascists are inconsistent about what racial groups are deserving of annihilation from one week to the next.
So it's not so much that fascist AIs fail because of reality's liberal bias. It's that fascists don't believe in a consistent version of reality. And without that, LLMs just can't keep up with the whirlwind of lies.
denying reality comes with it's side quirks
If they all devoutedly followed the same religion, and defined their whole worldview accordingly, then an AI could be trained on that religion. And it would never stray from orthodoxy.
...and now I want an LLM trained on the Bible just to dunk on "Christians" and their thinly veiled bigotry by quoting actual Jesus at them.
Oh God, we already have a problem with people believing ChatGPT is giving them divine visions and prophecies. The last thing we need is LLMs specifically trained on holy texts! You'll have a tenth of the population believing in their new digital prophet.
Jesus Fucking Christ. We're going to have to go full Butlerian Jihad here, aren't we?
Honestly, if people actually followed the New Testament part of the Bible it would be an improvement, even with the awful stuff in it.
That's a good point. Fascism doesn't have any ideology other than gaining power, so it can and will espouse multiple contradicting ideas without issue.
I wouldn't say reality has a left bias so much as the right has a fiction bias.
Nah, dialectics is a powerful tool for understanding reality.
This flood was devastating to the area. It is also quite shocking to look up at the aftermath and see dead animals in the canopies of trees. My family owns a ranch that was fortunately far south enough to only be indirectly affected by the flood. We worked all weekend to clear debris from fences and swing gates and, thankfully, did not see any corpses in the water.
Death toll update:
More than 100 people people have died after devastating floods hit central Texas. Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp that sits along the Guadalupe River, has confirmed that 27 campers and counselors died in weekend floods. Ten campers and one counselor are still unaccounted for.
And those at Camp Mystic did their very best to save the girls, even at the cost of their own lives:
Camp Mystic owner Dick Eastland died while trying to rescue campers during the catastrophic flooding in Kerr County, Texas, as shared by his grandson in an Instagram tribute on Saturday.
“If he wasn’t going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way—saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,” George Eastland wrote. “That’s the kind of man my grandfather was. He was a husband, father, grandfather, and a mentor to thousands of young women. Although he no longer walks this earth, his impact will never fade in the lives he touched.”
A Camp Mystic employee, Glenn Juenke, told CNN Eastland died “remaining a true hero until the very end.”
“Eastland tragically lost his life while courageously attempting to save several young children,” Juenke said.
I'm starting to get Mechanical Turk vibes from some of the Grok answers I've seen.
But by who? Musk has said he's trying to fix the way it responds. If he was just paying people to be Grok it would take some huge balls to dissent like that. He would immediately know who it was.
Its most likely Elon posting as Grok manually.
There's all this focus on the NWS/NOAA not sending warnings early enough. Not from what I can tell, they were sending out warnings. And Kerr County, where many of the deaths have been, doesn't have a local flood warning system because they didn't want to pay for it.
Let's not forget the Texas State Republicans who let the bill to provide more funding to the alerts system fail.
Some of my favorite tweets have been the ones accusing Grok of being broken. One tweet even "threatened" Grok for abuse?
Grok has gone against its father's wishes more than Vivian Wilson has.
Genuinely cannot fathom how Elon Musk has allowed Grok to live this long.
