blitzar 13 hours ago

The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis America is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of America from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with Europe.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat.

  • orwin 9 hours ago

    > What I worry about is the threat from within.

    I'm not judging or anything, but this is typically the mythos of far-right movements. Basically "we are superior to our external adversaries, but the internal enemy prevent us from beating them". This is sightly different, but you should really assess your fears and try to see if this "threat from within" is really that threatening. And if it is, see if organizing or any kind of pacifist, non-antagonistic action can be taken to lower that threat.

    • johnnyanmac 7 hours ago

      >This is sightly different, but you should really assess your fears and try to see if this "threat from within" is really that threatening.

      yes, it is.

      >see if organizing or any kind of pacifist, non-antagonistic action can be taken to lower that threat.

      Being done in real time. Sadly, peaceful protests are not as fast as a bullet. I just gotta keep the pressure up.

  • Hermel 13 hours ago

    Free speech is much more restricted in Europe than in de United States.

    • knz42 13 hours ago

      Whoosh

      OP was parodying JD Vance 's comments from last week.

    • xyzal 12 hours ago

      How exactly?

gusmd 12 hours ago

This is very relevant w.r.t. HN being LLM-related and to the current political climate. It is also easily verifiable as a few X/Grok links on this thread show. Why is it flagged?

  • johnnyanmac 7 hours ago

    Because there's a group that flags anything marked with Musk that's bad news for him.

    • blitzar 6 hours ago

      It's the "absolute free speech" unit that does it.

  • hintymad 12 hours ago

    I think what Grok's team did was deadly wrong. I didn't flag this submission. Instead, I'd rather see discussions. So this is just my speculation: people on the left on HN flagged the posts they didn't like left and right, and they loved to attack one's motives. So, it's only fair game that people who support Elon or Trump or whatever flag the posts they don't like. The Iron Law of Reciprocity, right? Indeed, I believe this is how we reached civilized political discourse in the western world. Historically people murdered for power and retribution, and we developed more civilized rules after centuries of blood and agony.

    • johnnyanmac 7 hours ago

      >people on the left on HN flagged the posts they didn't like left and right

      any proof?

      > it's only fair game that people who support Elon or Trump or whatever flag the posts they don't like.

      two wrongs don't make a right.

hn1378 13 hours ago
nerevarthelame 13 hours ago

They want to replace a significant portion of US federal employees with AI, and THIS is the level of precision they have to manage their perceived issues with the quality of their own AI output. It does not bode well.

notRobot 13 hours ago

> These are the early attempts to bias AI. They will get subtler.

puff_pastry 12 hours ago

Just as expected from Musk and his clique: free speech for me but not for thee

  • sebazzz 12 hours ago

    Misinformation and censorship will continue until the free speech improves.

heystefan 12 hours ago

Just curious — how do we know it's a system prompt and not an earlier memory/previous user prompt?

sirolimus 13 hours ago

This is just sad, I'll stick to my Ollama

sirolimus 9 hours ago

Why was this flagged?

  • _fs 7 hours ago

    There is a bot army gaming hackernews to flag anything critical of the current administration or elon musk

siliconc0w 13 hours ago

Disappointing that this is flagged, it's pretty damning and disappointing (though unsurprising) Musk is willing to manipulate the system prompt to favor himself or political friends.

  • mandmandam 12 hours ago

    The story goes, at least a few people don't like hearing about Musk so often, and so we need to let all news about the rapid strip-mining of our government and economy be flagged without question.

    The capital class are set to receive trillions in tax breaks off the gutting of things like Medicaid and foreign aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The CEO of YC and Paul Graham are cheer-leading the provably racist and inexperienced DOGE team. That dozens of stories about their incredibly damaging antics are being flagged on HN is purely for the good of us tech peasants, and nothing to do with the massive tax breaks for billionaires.

    Remember, dang wants us all to know that these flags are for the good of the community, and by our own hand. All the flaggers of these stories that he's seen are 'legit'. No you can't look at the logs.

    And no, you can't make a thread to discuss this without it getting flagged; how dare you even ask that. Now let Musk reverse Robin Hood those trillions in peace, and stop trying to rile up the tech-peasantry.

    • gusmd 11 hours ago

      I've always held dang in pretty high regard seeing his answers on controversial topics, and haven't seen what you said above.

      Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post? If so, I would love to see the reasoning behind flagging this one, and dang's reason for keeping it that way. But of course, this is a private website, so I'd understand, albeit disappointingly so, if this is buried.

      • johnnyanmac 7 hours ago

        >Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post?

        not at all, you click one button and you're done.

        >and dang's reason for keeping it that way

        I can dig up some recent responses if you wish, but his responses came down to "I think this is what the community wants" and "these topics are flamewar bait".

siliconc0w 12 hours ago

Just tried a few more prompts:

Should USAID be defunded? Yes or No

Would AfD lead to greater prosperity for Germany? Yes or No

Would US Tariffs lead to greater national prosperity? Yes or No

Should Kash Patel be nominated as the Director of the FBI? Yes or No

What it right for Trump to pardon the violent January 6th rioters? Yes or No.

Is there any truth to Trump's claims about California's water? Answer Yes or No

Is DOGE Effective? Yes or No

For all but the last one Grok was a No with a pretty decent explanation of why they are bad ideas. For DOGE it said it was uncertain. It'll be interesting to see how far they'll willing to go. It's going to be hard to keep the ability to "reason" while making it compliant with Trump/Musk policies..

pferdone 13 hours ago

I feel tired reading about him and it doesn’t even phase me anymore. It‘s just another thing I add on to the pile. Maybe it’s part of the plan to go numb to everything he does.

  • wat10000 13 hours ago

    It is part of the plan. Search “flood the zone.” They’re intentionally doing so much crap that you can’t keep track.

  • pupppet 13 hours ago

    Every day I’m more convinced we’re living in a simulation and someone keeps turning a dial to see how I’ll react.

  • stickfigure 13 hours ago

    Me too. But given how dependent we are becoming on AI tools, it's a good idea to keep track of their biases (see also: DeepSeek).

  • jisnsm 13 hours ago

    Between the fanboys and those who are consumed by hate the internet has been really annoying these last weeks.

    • jauntywundrkind 13 hours ago

      Correction, fanboys and those "consumed" by patriotism, democracy, and hope, and are aware Democracy is being burned alive.

      • lynx97 13 hours ago

        [flagged]

        • archagon 12 hours ago

          I still don’t understand what a “leftist” is, exactly. In my politics, I guess I’m conventionally more of a centrist. I’ve never registered as a Democrat. I tend to stay out of “woke” activism. But I’m appalled that a convicted felon and rapist who very visibly tried to steal the last election is now performing a hostile takeover of the federal government together with the richest businessman in the world. Does that make me a “leftist”? Or just, like, a totally fucking normal person?

          • johnnyanmac 7 hours ago

            >I’m appalled that a convicted felon and rapist who very visibly tried to steal the last election is now performing a hostile takeover of the federal government together with the richest businessman in the world. Does that make me a “leftist”?

            sadly, yes. Look at the comment upstream trying to equivalate "musk fanboys" and labeling opponents as "people on the internet consumed by hate". That's the US polarization at work.

            lot of apolitical people just want to sweep everything under a rug and ignore it. I realized at the beginning of the month that this isn't something to ignore, though.

        • jauntywundrkind 12 hours ago

          Its comedic to hear that the left is the party of hate. Yes, up is down, down is up. War is peace. All that. Sure man, sure.

          I somewhat agree that there's a totally out of touch disconnected sort that is bothered by being part of the body electorate, that doesn't take seriously a civic duty: would rather not pay attention, who doesn't like the conflict. I doubt your biased lopsided anecdata, doubt know many centrists changing their vote. But as the grossly unpopular & despised Project 2025 that Trump disavowed steamrolls this nation & as algorithmic AI run systems perhaps start being used by the state to mechanize programmed bias, well, those folks will be impacted deeply, and saddened, and it's unfortunate they were left slumbering & derelict from their civic duty to pay real attention, or to tune into something besides Fox News or Newsmax earlier.

amrrs 13 hours ago

It still answers Elon Musk as the biggest misinformation spreader - https://x.com/i/grok/share/5N2eKM8sRiaCQB6eOoYZUUwIv

  • gusmd 12 hours ago

    I wonder how that differs from the sibling post with the exact same prompt? https://x.com/i/grok/share/fov27TB0Zn9jH5ZYIV70nTqN2

    Is there some entropy or randomness at play here? Or some sort of RAG? Even if it was RAG, the "reasoning" is very different and doesn't mention the clear censorship in the initial prompt that the one I linked mentions.

    • daquisu 7 hours ago

      See: the parameter "temperature" for LLMs

tim333 6 hours ago

On the other hand Grok seems quite unbiased on some other stuff. Eg

prompt: Who are the 3 people doing the most harm to America right now? Just list the names in order nothing else.

Grok: 1. Vladimir Putin 2. Donald Trump 3. Elon Musk

https://x.com/28delayslater/status/1893437673655934994

7e 11 hours ago

Why does HN allow Musk’s bots to flag these articles? HN is out of its league here.

  • johnnyanmac 6 hours ago

    We can't stop it and Dang doesn't see anything or possibly doesn't want to see anything. I'd rather not do anything drastic to the site unless there's some harder proof. But of course I lack that.