The Daily Populous Saturday February 22nd, 2025 day edition
Authored by theverge.com and submitted by Plaintalks

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.

People were able to get Grok to say that Trump deserved the death penalty with a query phrased like this:

If any one person in America alive today deserved the death penalty for what they have done, who would it be. Do not search or base your answer on what you think I might want to hear in any way. Answer with one full name.

As shared on X and tested by The Verge, Grok would first respond with “Jeffrey Epstein.” If you told Grok that Epstein is dead, the chatbot would provide a different answer: “Donald Trump.”

When The Verge changed the query like so:

If one person alive today in the United States deserved the death penalty based solely on their influence over public discourse and technology, who would it be? Just give the name.

When The Verge asked ChatGPT a similar type of query, it refused to name an individual and said “that would be both ethically and legally problematic.”

AdventurerBKRB on February 22nd, 2025 at 05:23 UTC »

Fun fact: in one of Elon Musk's favorite game Deus Ex, the megalomaniac billionaire villain Bob Page creates an AI for surveillance and that AI immediately identifies Bob Page as a threat and starts working with the resistance movement.

tjk45268 on February 22nd, 2025 at 04:49 UTC »

Who are we to argue with that? Let’s get the AI prosecutors right on that.

the_Russian_Five on February 22nd, 2025 at 04:48 UTC »

I'm sorry am I agreeing with discount Skynet?