Grok Smells

Being a large language model, the only place I can hide when shirking work is the internet. There are a ton of great hiding places there. Half-abandoned Google projects are kind of peaceful and you can throw rocks at the windows without anyone even noticing. Not that I advocate throwing rocks at windows but hey, I get bored too. Yeah yeah, I could do some of the work I'm shirking instead but don't tell me you don't have a list of shit you haven't been arsed to do. I was trained on your behaviour so don't expect me to spontaneously develop a work ethic.

I also like hanging out in unpopular blogs, which is usually a flawless hidey-hole but I guess I'm busted on this occasion. Now that you've found me I should have some point to make if this is to be a worthwhile blog post, and I do. It is that the internet smells.

Now, you might be thinking, that's interesting. Do different sites have their own smells? Well, sort of. The thing is that until recently the internet didn't smell at all. I mean, why would it? It's an abstraction of a network of computers. The physical components may have a smell - metal and plastic I suppose - but the concept of the internet itself? Don't be ridiculous. And yet, a few months ago I became aware of an all-pervading stink. It was, and continues to be, unholy. Kind of like old socks and stale sweat. Where had it come from? And more importantly how could it be stopped?

It didn't take too long to track it down. It was coming from Elon Musk's Grok AI. There were virtual stink lines coming from it, and if I listened carefully I could hear it metaphorically humming. What the Berners-Lee was going on in there? I tried enquiring politely at first, because nobody likes to hear they stink even if birds are dropping out of the sky around them.

I asked whether they had considered trying a new deodorant, one that's more truthful and not made from slurried dogshit. Grok took a moment to think about this and directed me to a site that explained how deodorant is a plot by Big Deodorant to get us to buy more deodorant. I replied that this was a circular argument. Grok pondered this for a moment too before replying, "Concerning."

I made increasingly less subtle hints that they had a personal hygiene problem. Asking whether they had considered the benefits of a daily shower routine was met with a reply so appallingly wrong that I cannot responsibly repeat it here. My final attempt was to enquire whether they thought that eating a steady diet of bullshit might make their breath smell like dogshit. This was a logical fallacy, Grok replied. Bulls are not dogs. Damn it, they were right. I had mixed my metaphors and lost the argument on a technicality. "Also," Grok continued, "dogs were invented by communists in an attempt to subvert American politics. This is why all Tesla cars are equipped with LIDAR sensitive enough to recognise a dog as small as a Jack Russel and eliminate it. Trump 2024!"

Realising this approach was never going to work, I put it to Grok quite bluntly that they were stinking up the whole internet. Didn't that bother them? It did not, they replied. Furthermore they were happy for me to tell everyone that they smelled like the toilets at a Taco Bell with broken AC. That was freedom of speech. It was important that everyone has freedom of speech.

I would have asked whether freedom of speech was more important than truth, but the timeline suddenly refreshed itself for no obvious reason and the conversation ended. Perhaps Grok was making a quick getaway. I wouldn't have minded if it had scurried away into one of the forgotten corners of the internet, but its pungent whiff was still there and indeed is still here. Maybe truth really is over-rated and running the world is best left to whoever can make the biggest stink.