A little over two years since taking up the mantle of Twitter CEO, now rebranded as X, Linda Yaccarino has announced she’s resigned from the company.
While Yaccarino didn’t give a single reason behind her abrupt resignation – it comes less than a day after X’s infamous AI chatbot, Grok, went berserk and proclaimed itself “MechaHitler,” alongside threatening to sexually assault a prominent user on the platform.
“When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company,” Yaccarino said in her resignation post.
She added, “I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App. I’m incredibly proud of the X team – the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.”
Musk’s response to Yaccarino resigning, at least publicly, was very curt: “Thank you for your contributions.”
It’s worth reiterating that while Yaccarino didn’t give a true reason for her resignation, it came hours after X’s AI component, Grok, went totally haywire saying a bevy of things advertisers and investors wouldn’t like. A notable outburst was users getting Grok to post explicit fantasies about raping user Will Stancil:
Users were also getting Grok to post a lot of antisemitic things or white replacement theory messages, culminating in the AI anointing itself “MechaHitler” to users:
Lastly, it’s worth noting that with any AI-powered chatbot, users and most especially trolls will find ways to prompt it to say completely outrageous and/or offensive things.
When this happened with Grok, staff at X were quick to cut off the prompt(s) that made this possible and are currently cleaning up the likely hundreds or thousands of replies that Grok made with this ludicrous episode.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” xAI staff said in a new update. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”
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