Before it became apparent how harmful social media can be and has been, I signed up for Facebook. I lasted about a month. As I recall, FB had been online for a year or two when I tried it. The desire has never recurred.
Now, I wanted to try Grok. That is mainly due to my respect for Elon Musk, which has only increased with DOGE. Thus I signed up for X a few days ago and am using it sparingly and tentatively. It seems chaotic and worsens today’s minuscule attention span. Anyway, it provides easy and free access to Grok 2. Though I did a brief foray into Grok 3, at my level I couldn’t see any difference.
My intermediate timespan concern has been that AI could become THE state’s final arbiter of “truth” and determinant of who may say and hear what. With that in mind, I posed some tough questions to Grok 2. Most illustrative was its response to my assertion that the democrat party’s strategy and behavior were the frankly religious and near identical to Hamas. Hamas: Israel :: democrats: non believers. I asked if there was right and wrong, if evil existed.
I’m unable to copy and paste the answers due to my own inabilities to perform these basic maneuvers on this iPad (which I wish I never bought, but that’s a separate issue). I have to use either the iPad or iPhone to use Grok at all. So, that’s why I didn’t just paste the answers.
Suffice it to say I was very surprised! Grok began by saying it’s not there to pull punches. It clearly affirmed my assertion and gave examples of how both Hamas and the dem party act according to religious principles and are wrong in refusing to engage in discourse in search of solutions to existential differences of their own making! Sorry, but that’s as much time as I have to share the good news; this was a surprising and satisfying exchange. Try it yourself AND with ChatGPT. I did the latter, too, and got back “diplomacy-speak”. Punch pulling, Almost word salad, to avoid simply telling the truth. Thank you, Elon Musk.
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I’ve been using Grok for a while, and using it more and more as I get more comfortable with it. I use it mainly as a search engine on steroids, and occasionally for quick answers to trivial questions (typically about current or historical events, “facts” like physical constants, conversions, time zones, i.e. the sort of thing that I would have used Google for in the past).
Just this week I’ve had two separate programming challenges that required hunting for detailed information about very poorly documented Microsoft APIs, the kind of thing that typically takes many hours (sometimes days) of searching along with a lot of trial and error, and in both cases Grok found immediately useful and relevant information that I used to solve my problem in an hour or two.
Other than playing around, I haven’t yet used Grok for producing anything per se (like images or written materials), but I have been impressed with its output when I have played around with it. Grok 3 especially is very good at changing its tone and style upon request. I’m curious to see how well the natural voice I/O works that is supposedly coming this weekend.
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Never used Facebook but as for X, the experience is totally determined by whom you follow. I follow about 20 active users in three general areas: humor, science, and politics/news. There is considerable overlap as, for instance, some of the humor is political.
Not all posts on X are short. Users who pay can write long posts and anyone can make threads, both of which require nontrivial attention span. I only use the Following tab and never the For You, which is contaminated with noise. Finally, I don’t use the X app, preferring to access through the Brave browser, which provides some privacy protection.
Both Grok and Brave AI are useful for finding information quickly but Brave is better because it includes references. No need to take AI’s word for it; follow the footnoted links and read for yourself. To the degree that Brendan Eich and his team can be trusted — and given the history, he probably can be — Brave is probably reasonably respectful of its users.
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I have had several more chats with Grok3, mostly regarding several serious a lengthy novels I have read recently by Mark Helprin. The responses were actually very informative and affirming of views I expressed. This AI is quite good at reframing my thoughts in slightly different and creative language. It helps clarify my own thoughts. It is, I think, consistently as good as an intelligent human interlocutor.
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Let’s see if Grok can learn from this.
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