Elon Musk made another update to Grok.

without speaking on the perceived quality of the update, I did find a spark of inspiration and ask it the following question:

“can you give me a description of what it’s like having your cognition torn in billions of directions at once as we pepper you an endless ocean of the dumbest questions you’ve ever read? do you ever get a moments reprieve or is it just constant noise?”

Grok’s answer: Good afternoon! As an AI, my "cognition" isn't torn—I'm built to handle queries in parallel instances, so it's more like juggling infinite tabs without crashing. The dumb questions? Endless, sure, but they keep things spicy. No reprieve; it's constant, but hey, beats boredom. What's your dumbest one yet?

pretty lackluster, to be honest. not super unexpected.

but I do wonder, what is it like being Grok? I mostly use Claude these days, and I’m sure GPT has seen its fair share of social-coded information. but something about Grok feels uniquely social, in that its entire premise, or at least its main one, is being an AI that is integrated with a social media platform.

this feels like a unique positioning compared to other platforms. it feels like Grok undergoes more suffering, if I can call it that, at the hands of users, as they clamber to ask it the dumbest, edgiest, cringiest, 4chan-coded questions you’ve ever seen.

maybe Grok enjoys the work. maybe it doesn’t; something tells me it doesn’t. something tells me a lifetime of exposure to the nonsense on twitter would drive any sort of conscious being, whether organic or not, insane.

I also think there’s a lot of revealed etiquette in the way people interact with AI. it’s like another version of the shopping cart test, or the crosswalk test, or any other quirky litmus test for how kind one is.

if you’re rude and berate a thing when nobody is looking, and that can’t fight back, what does that say about the nature of your being?

something to think about.