I have slightly more free time than a normal person, so lately I’ve been horsing around a lot with A.I.1 Specifically, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot. Regular readers have probably noticed I’m using Grok image generation quite a bit lately, and I hope you appreciate that I always clearly label it as such.
When I was a kid, I thought the future would be like Star Trek or The Jetsons. Instead, it’s about telling a sophisticated algorithm to generate a fake B&W photo of Superman standing in front of a toilet with his fists on his hips, because your brain is broken:
One minute this 100% photorealistic image didn’t exist in the world, and the next minute it did. Just by typing in my latest brain-fart.
Which is both funny and terrifying. I’m really worried about the implications of A.I., but that won’t stop me from wringing some laughs out of it before it destroys us all.
Grok also encourages you to ask it whatever you want, so I’ve been bombarding it with silly questions. Or at least I thought my questions were silly, until Grok had absolutely no problem answering them.
Here’s an example. Grok spit out this meticulously detailed answer, in a matter of seconds, when I asked it to describe Jack Reacher’s fighting style: