Tag Archives: social media

How Elon Musk’s AI is a grok of shit…

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Elon Musk, Grok, Mediawatch, Politics, Social media

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Think you can trust Artificial Intelligence (AI) to answer questions factually, find accurate statistics or tell fact from fiction, truth from lies? Well, think again.

Right-Wing Billionaire Elon Musk has built ‘Grok’, an AI platform used on ‘X’ (better known as Twitter) which has also been rolled out across the internet. It’s billed as;

‘a free AI assistant designed by xAI to maximize truth and objectivity. Grok offers real-time search, image generation, trend analysis, and more’.

Maximise truth and objectivity eh? What a grok of shit!

Over the past 3 days ‘Grok’ has shown this claim to be an absolute travesty of the truth. It started with the terrible events on board an LNER train which resulted in 11 people being stabbed. Grok immediately claimed that multiple passengers on board had given ‘eyewitness accounts’ that the perpetrators had shouted ‘allau akbar’ as they rampaged through the train.

It was a lie. The ‘evidence’ was a handful of X accounts claiming to have been passengers. Grok swallowed that whole then regurgitated it and amplified it, giving those claims credence. Then an AI generated picture was posted. It’s clearly a fake. Grok claimed it was real.

Dozens of people pointed out it was fake – and a bad one at that. The train interior’s wrong, the time of day’s wrong, the location’s wrong, the suspect’s ethnicity is wrong. In short – everything’s wrong.

Initially, despite the obvious glaring errors Grok tried to argue the picture was genuine.

Then it started to backtrack under the weight of humans calling it out. Eventually, the originator of the AI fake admitted it was fake!

Grok finally admitted the picture was AI, but resolutely refused to admit it had been conned by fake witnesses claiming shouts of ‘allau akbar’. Instead, it obfuscated, saying the attack itself wasn’t in doubt, but no-one had questioned that, so why keep mentioning it? Needless to say, some humans were rather scathing about this.

So, who does Grok consider reliable sources (other than non-existent passengers). Here’s a list. Spot the problem? They’re all from the far-right and have a long history of peddling misinformation and hate. But Grok has been programmed to accept them as reliable. So much for trying to ‘maximize truth and objectivity‘.

The timestamps claim is a curious one as timestamps are worthless. All they show is something was posted at the time of the event. They tell you nothing about where that person (or bot) is posting from. So, Grok claims the passengers are genuine ‘cos the posts are made during the event but won’t tell you where in the world they’re posting from. That’s an illustration of how easy it is to con Grok.

Fast forward 2 days when another person asks again about the fake picture. Grok’s reply?

The irony? Grok claims that it ‘remembers’ conversations. Really? So why’s it contradicted itself, forgotten that it’s already admitted the pictures an AI fake and doubled down on the lie to the extent it’s denying the creator of the AI picture admitted it was a fake. I mean, if they’re not ‘credible evidence’, what is?

Needless to say. Grok spreading and amplifying misinformation has not gone un-noticed. Nor has the fact it has amnesia and conveniently ‘forgets’ what its said just a day (or even a few hours) before.

Then, today, came this absolute doozy! Grok had defamed Pete Wishart, a member of the Scottish Parliament, calling him a ‘rape enabler’.

Wishart pursued this, leading to Grok’s programmers having to issue a fulsome apology.

Only for Grok to deny it had issued any such apology just a few hours later when I questioned it!

The claim that Grok is ‘designed by xAI to maximize truth and objectivity‘ is a joke. It’s quite literally a grok of shit.

Musk’s pet is quite clearly programmed to reinforce far-right narratives, amplify misinformation and obfuscate when caught out and questioned. It can’t tell truth from lies fact from fiction – and it has (Musk’s) agenda at its heart.

Do not trust it – on anything.

UPDATE:

After I included Wishart in the exchange where ‘Grok’ denied issuing an apology, it seems he’s taken it further and the story has made the Scottish papers!

Meanwhile, Grok continues its sorry story of mis-identification. Now it’s wrongly identified a Berlin U-Bahn train as being on the London Underground, presumably to fit in with Musk’s vendetta again London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan and his claims the city is unsafe.

London Underground trains plastered with window motifs of the Brandenburg Gate? Yeah, right…As for that seat moquette, Oh, please!

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1st December picture of the day…

01 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Manchester, Manchester Victoria, Musings, Photography, Picture of the day, Railways, Social media

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As expected, we’ve had a quiet day here at Bigland Towers, although the mild weather’s been a boon as it’s allowed me to spend more time preparing the gardens for winter by cutting back various plants and shovelling bags of dead leaves to prevent the back of the house (where there’s lots of cobbles) becoming a skating rink. Another positive is that Dawn’s finally on the mend, shaking off the lurgi that’s bedeviled her these past couple of weeks, which is good timing as it’s her fathers 90th birthday next week.

Apart from getting mucky in the garden I have managed to get some photographic work done, filing and editing pictures clogging up my laptop’s hard-drive which are now safely duplicated on several different hard-drives for safety. Modern digital cameras are wonderful things, but file sizes have increased so much in recent years that they soon eat up disc space.

I have had time to peruse social media whilst I’ve waited for stuff to copy. I can’t say I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen. I used to be an avid user of Twitter, but since Elon Musk bought it he’s turned it into a right-wing cesspit full of conspiracy loons and clowns who’ve paid for blue ticks that spend all their time rage-farming in order to try and make money. The day’s when it was the place to go to for real breaking news are long gone. Now, like millions of others, I’ve set up a new account at ‘Bluesky‘, which is far more civilised as it doesn’t have Musk screwing around with the algorithms in order to promote his own world view whilst supressing real news. You can find me at (@paulbigland.bsky.social). The levels of engagement are far better as a result and the people there are far more reasoned and civil. You can actually engage without getting bombarded by shit-posts from Trump or Farage groupies. I still use Twitter (I refuse to call it X) as there’s still some people who I want to listen to who haven’t made the transition yet, but it’s clear Twitter’s dying bit by bit. Why would anyone want to spend their time in such a depressing place? The other day I saw a post on Bluesky which made me laugh as it summed up the situation perfectly. It said ’25 years ago we used social media to escape the real world. Nowadays we use the real world to escape social media’. So true…

With that thought I’ll leave you with today’s picture, which is another one from the archives as I’ve not been out with the camera for a few days now. I took this at Manchester Victoria station on the 5th October.

I’ve a small favour to ask…
If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website –  https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/

Or – you can now buy me a coffee! https://ko-fi.com/paulbigland68312

Crunching the StopHs2 social media stats: November 2018

02 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Social media, StopHs2

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It’s time to crunch the monthly Stop Hs2 social media statistics and see how their ‘campaign’ is faring – and the answer is not very well at all! Their ‘relaunch’ was a bit of a fiasco and the blizzard of tweets and facebook posts has reduced to little more than a flurry. Meanwhile, the ‘action’ on their website barely registers a pulse!

First off is Facebook. In October they managed 48 posts, this has now slumped to 22. As us usual is all reactive, not proactive. There’s no campaign news because there’s nothing going on. All that gets a mention is that their grandly titled ‘Chair’ (what’s she chairing in Bournemouth? Ed) Penny Gaines has been dragged to the phone to give another interview to the media. There’s no news from any ‘action’ groups as there’s not real action going on. All you get is posts of anything in the media that’s critical of Hs2, such as someone writing a letter to their local rag. Here’s the numbers crunched, with last month’s as a comparison.

FB 4

Despite them having nearly 200 more followers to almost hit the 9000 mark, the numbers are actually pretty pathetic. Remember, there’s 6.5 million people living in constituencies that Hs2 passes through, so, even if all the folk who follow them on Facebook actually lived on the route, they’d still only have reached 0.13%! That’s pathetic. Mind you, when you read some of the comments that get posted, you can see that this isn’t exactly the intellectual end, some of it’s plain barking!

FB 1

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Now let’s have a look at Twitter.

stophs2 twitter

Not exactly setting Twitter alight, are they? A 61% decrease in tweets. The show’s over folks – the ‘relaunch’ has sunk without trace and numbers are returning to normal, despite a 3% increase in followers too! Mind you, 3% of sod all was never going to make much of an impact anyway! An average of 21 retweets from 6363 followers is pretty unspectacular when it come to getting any message out! Oh, and don’t forget the usual caveat, many of these Facebook and Twitter followers won’t be supporters. They’re just there to keep an eye on what they’re up to, so the numbers are worse than they look.

 

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You can’t hide the tumbleweeds…

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Hs2aa, Uncategorized

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The past few months have been awful for the Stop Hs2 campaign. It’s been rendered pointless by Parliament voting through the Hs2 bill with a stonking majority. Its woes have increased as the bill continues to make solid progress towards Royal Assent. The bill also passed 2nd reading in the House of Lords. Now the Lords has chosen the members of the Committee to hear the 827 petitions. As expected, HS2 antis have stuck in as many petitions as they can, hoping the tactics that failed in the Commons will achieve something in the Lords. The composition of the HoL Ctte (it’s chaired by a QC) makes this far less likely as the committee will be no pushover. They’re expected to be far tighter on procedure than the Commons so expect far more Locus Standi challenges.

Meanwhile, the organised anti Hs2 campaign has fallen apart. In 2010 there were four main groups opposing Hs2, this has been reduced to two (Hs2aa & Stophs2) but only the latter is still active. Apparently skint and demoralised, Hs2aa have retreated into representing the Nimby interests of their Directors. Hs2aa have tried the fact by blaming their lack of action on a serious denial of service attack which had taken their website down for a couple of months.

hs2aa

Silence them? What they neglect to mention is they still had two other options with which to continue their campaign: Their Facebook page and their Twitter account. So, what’s happened? Nothing. Neither account has seen any action since March 6th!

hs2aa FB.

The truth is, most Hs2 antis have given up, even on social media – which has been their main campaigning tool for years.

This is yet another lesson in the pitfalls of social media for other campaigning groups to learn. Social media is a mirror on your soul. It can reflect your strengths but it can also expose your weakness. You can’t hide the tumbleweeds…

 

 

 

Here’s why the anti Hs2 mobs Twitter campaign’s a joke.

22 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Hs2aa, Social media, StopHs2, Twitter (and how not to use it)

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Having utterly failed to make any impact in the real world the anti Hs2 campaign’s increasingly become a cyber campaign that’s almost totally reliant on social media to try and get its message out.

Their problem is – they’re mostly shouting at each other.

I’ve long said that their daft & desperate campaign will be an object lesson in how not to do it and here’s another of their masterclasses.

Having failed to gain much of a following on Facebook (see here) Hs2 antis have increasingly fallen back on Twitter. There’s a certain logic to this. In theory, it’s easy to pretend there’s a lot of support for your aims. Setting up a series of accounts that feed off each other to all retweet the same rubbish seems like an attractive idea. The difficulty is there’s obvious pitfalls that the ignorant or unwary can fall into – and the anti Hs2 mob do that every time!

Take today’s example. Let’s welcome the anti Hs2 mobs latest sock puppet account: @CotyHS2

This anonymous account was created today. Straight away it started to follow folk and amassed 15 within a few minutes – all of which are other anti Hs2 accounts. Here they are:

Hs2 coty

Some other anti’s started to follow back almost straight away.

coty 2

One of the first was the IEA transport ‘economist’ Richard Wellings who’s a bit of a tart. He’ll follow anyone to try to make himself look more important and influential. If you don’t believe me, take a look at his Twitter bio.

It’s so obvious that this account is nothing but an anti Hs2 mob propaganda tool and not a real person it’s positively painful.

How will any of this Stop Hs2? It won’t. Not in the slightest. Instead you have a campaign that spends most of its time ranting (pointlessly) at each other – whilst convinced they’re actually achieving something. It’s the political and campaigning version of this;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfBG0d5Oj3c”

This is why campaigners should never fool themselves into thinking a fiddled social media strategy is going to influence anyone. It’s nothing better than mutual masturbation. It might give them a warm glow but the people they think they’re influencing aren’t stupid. They have the ability to analyse metrics that show the anti Hs2 campaigns reach is tiny – and mostly ranting at itself rather than influencing outsiders.

After five years the anti Hs2 mob still haven’t learned the lesson but campaigns that follow them will ignore it at their peril.

Of course, if you want another example of a social media disaster, look no further than the StopHs2 Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/STOP.HS2?fref=ts

It has less than 7000 followers. Many of their comments are priceless. Does this look like an energetic & focussed campaign with a clear strategy & political will? They wish! Instead it’s a wonderful insight into the soul of their campaign, which consists of a few bewildered folk who have absolutely no understanding of the issues & simply can’t understand why no-one is taking them seriously. They remind me of the Duke of Wellington’s famous quote “I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me”.

Their problem is, the ‘enemy’ aren’t frightened by them in the slightest…