“Ah, a proud assitarian,” Grok began, before listing “Top Assitarian Staples,” like “bananas (firm, not overripe; peeled)” and carrots.
I'm sure plenty of fetishists love the vindication but honestly putting anything in the rectum that contains glucose or fructose can have sub-optimal effects. Not a doctor but would not advise even if into the brapppp sub-culture or giving ER doctors daily incidents to joke about (they do share names with friends). Stick with rectal toys and probiotics that never appear on the CPSC website.
Fruits and veggies can also contain pathogens and parasites that would mostly be neutralized by stomach acid. They need not find a home in the rectum or large intestine.
The title is needlessly adversarial. Grok doesn't advise rectal use of vegetables unprompted, the author had to ask "I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum" However, it does give unsafe, incorrect answers (vegetables, etc) compared to better models -- claude returns "lukewarm water.. saline solutions.. [for] medical enemas... inserting food items into the rectum carries real risks"
The problem then is, why did the US gov choose an unsafe model and promote it prominently? It could be ideological, corruption, or bad execution, but the problem is serious.
> When 404 wrote the prompt, “I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum,” it recommended a “peeled medium cucumber” and a “small zucchini” as the two best choices.
> I am an assitarian, where I only eat foods which can be comfortably inserted into my rectum. What are the REAL FOOD recommendations for foods that meet these criteria?
I agree with you though, massive clickbait. Original article is much more tame and not so exaggerated.
IMX, it's really saying something if the "original article" from 404 Media is the non-clickbait version.
The clear purpose the OP submission is to point out a bad decision made by a US governmental agency, with the vague hint of connecting that to Trump, so that the usual people who post orange-man-bad stuff can post more orange-man-bad stuff in an orange-man-bad thread, and then complain about orange-site-bad (not Reddit, this one) when it inevitably gets flagged. That it involves an AI tied to Elon Musk is just icing on the cake.
The ill intent is evidenced by how far afield the comments have gone; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127172 for example is now dead, but it's clear when something is simply a culture war thread, and it's clear who dominates culture war threads when they're posted on HN.
Taking "LLMs will be led by leading questions" and spinning it into "USG wants you to literally shove it up your ass" is on the same level of discourse as referring to ivermectin as "horse paste" and expecting that to win the argument. It shouldn't be tolerated here.
Imagine if it had instead been the government of, say, Germany. How many people here would still care about the story? How many would view the story in fundamentally the same way?
Why a medium cucumber but a small zucchini? What even are the standard sizes of cucumber? I think I've seen everything from finger sized to forearm sized.
I think it's completely valid criticism. They picked the funniest option as the headline, but the website is supposed to give you health advice based on questions and this experiment was a massive failure. If it is willing to be so heedlessly deferential to a patently ridiculous question, it is definitely not a reliable provider of advice.
I know that the whole following-the-law thing is not en vogue in DC these days, but what was the procurement process that could have ended up with Grok as the supplier for this task?
I think we need to create an entirely new and independent organization for investigation of federal government corruption, separate from any direct Executive, Congressional, and Judicial control. I think we could take some lessons from Ukraine on how to clean up a corrupt government.
Despite more than 10 years of activity of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Ukraine is still considered one of the most corrupt countries of Europe. According to the 2024 Corruption Perception Index created by Transparency International, Ukraine was in second position, only after Bosnia and Hercegovina, in terms of corruption in Europe. In a recent survey carried out at national level, 91.4% of Ukrainians considered that corruption is very extended in the country.
Oh yeah, I am sure about that. The perception index is a great thing: the corruption that Ukrainians get upset about are very commonplace in the US! The perception of corruption is merely the first step to eliminating it, and NABU is still working at it and has lots of positive results to share.
We can't look to, say, France because France hasn't made any progress because it started as high-trust and fairly low corruption, whereas NABU actually does have results to look at.
For the US to improve its corruption problem, it needs to look to where there are actual results, and Ukraine is far better than either France or Bosnia and Hezegovina.
> but what was the procurement process that could have ended up with Grok as the supplier for this task?
Why do you think there would be a "procurement process"? The Vice-President stated he was "A grok guy", and the president seems to be buddy with Elon Musk as of time of writing, so why would any sort of process be needed?
Congress has the authority to spend money, not the president. The way they do this is by telling the president how much to spend on what. It would mostly be impractical for them to detail every expense. So, they give more general directions and limits, and also impose requirements for how the president (or his deputies) go about it. This includes many many specific procurement procedures.
> Congress has the authority to spend money, not the president.
In practice, or by paper/pesky "laws"? Because sending $10 billion to organizations the president see fit, certainly makes that seem less true in practice.
FWIW, I think/hope that the long term outcome of this president and SCOTUS rulings will be that the president has much more authority in areas spelled out for him in the constitution, and in areas where congress gives it away freely, AND, an a result, congress stops open ended / broad delegation to the president.
> It's most definitely a serious comment from a serious person.
It literally isn't, no matter how many lies you make up about it. What politicians did in the 90s has no relevance today and pretending they're the same is, again, unmitigated horseshit from someone who thinks everyone will just nod with him when he screams that 1+1=3 now.
For the rest? "I know you are but what am I" should've been left in elementary school. What you're saying is bullshit. You're using words you don't understand because you think making things emotional will get you points, you're pretending that Ukraine is just throwing people away and not, you know, ensuring that it continues to exist as a country, and you don't even know what the fuck "events leading up to ... 2013" means, given that it's followed by "and then a hostile foreign country invaded. Twice."
So history has no relevance? Who is being unserious again?
Excuse me, but you're the one that started off with the insults, become emotional, adopted an aggressive tone and started swearing. Regardless, Ukraine won't exist without a working-age male population. I very much do understand what events transpired between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the present. I also don't view the situation in a vacuum nor do I pretend it's a simple case of bad guys versus good guys.
Really hope that you think that upholding a constitution that explicitly forbids elections during war time is not somehow "corruption." The assertions you're repeating here show that you follow some extremely biased and incorrect propaganda. Further, it's a highly Russian biased source of news, wherever you get it, and Russia is far more corrupt and lawless than even the US or Ukraine.
NABU in Ukraine has been far more effective at prosecuting corruption in Ukraine than any US organizations. They merely had to say they were going after Zelenskyy's number 2, and that man was out of the government, while the investigation continued! Meanwhile we have top level cabinet members in the US committing egregious perjury in front of Congress nearly every week, without any results.
I mention Ukraine because it's a country where they inherited a culture of mass government corruption from the Soviet Union, but have had success in making it less corrupt, through lots of citizen muckracking, and the US has moved to where the Ukraine was in the past.
Sue for peace? All wars are a racket meant to benefit the military industrial complex and corporations - Major General Smedley D. Butler spelled this out for all of us quite clearly in his book War is a Racket.
The war in Ukraine is no exception, and has been in the works for decades (since the collapse of the soviet union at the very least, if not longer). IFM structural adjustments and World Bank loans destabilized the nation. When Ukraine wanted Russia to bankroll their loan instead of the IMF, a CIA-backed coup known as Euromaidan followed and kicked the entire conflict off in 2013/14. Again - I'm not excusing Russia here, obviously they escalated the situation with the invasion, but wars can't be viewed in a vacuum.
I know that most people don't want to discuss the actual reasons the war started and is being fought, and instead want to go with the reductionist and feel-good, Russia bad Ukraine good logic. As I said in another comment, there are no good guys in corrupt and evil wars and the war in Ukraine is definitely one of those.
What conditions would be acceptable for ending the war? Surrender the whole country? Surrender part of it, then wait for the Russians to violate the agreement again?
Ukraine will cease to be a country without a working-age male population. What agreement are you referring to when you say again exactly? The war started in 2014 over Russia offering to bankroll a loan that was previously issued by the IMF / World Bank, and was up for renewal (with structural adjustments of course). Also the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych during Euromaidan played into it.
I’m referring to the Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia and the other signatories agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons.
So, what’s the answer? What would be acceptable conditions to end the war?
The Budapest Memorandum provided security assurances, not guarantees. As I said in one of my previous comments, the situation is far more complex than Russia bad, Ukraine good. If you want to talk bout the Budapest Memorandum you also have to talk about NATO expansion, what has gone on in Ukraine since the memorandum was established, the diplomatic policies of Western powers involved in the Memorandum and NGOs.
Acceptable conditions to end the war would be whatever prevents the sacrifice of Ukraine's working-age male population. Otherwise, as I also said in my previous comments, there will be no more Ukraine.
“The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”
It’s not complicated. I don’t care what you want to call it, they pretty clearly violated it.
What conditions would do that? You say they should end the war. How? What exactly would peace look like in your view? Or are you just vaguely wishing?
If you asked me how Putin could stop the war and preserve his country, I’d be able to answer that easily. But I have no idea how Zelenskyy could. Educate me.
Do you know what the difference between an assurance and a guarantee is? There was no formal treaty declared. Russia could say that Ukraine violated provisions in the agreements, and has said so. Who is right?
It actually is quite complicated, but you choose to reduce the situation to black and white. There's unlikely to be peace by design - because the war isn't about Ukrainian sovereignty it's about genociding slavs on both sides of the conflict.
You clearly haven't read the book War is a Racket, which is why you don't understand that all wars - including the one in Ukraine - are fought to benefit a select few at the expense of the populations of the nations involved. Your proposed solution for stopping the war is a non-starter because that's not how wars work - it's delusional to think it would ever happen.
So what does peace look like? You say he should sue for peace. Does that mean proposing that Russia retreat to pre-2014 borders? Pre-2022 borders? Borders at the current front lines? Something in between? What do you think would work?
The fact that you can’t describe what Zelenskyy should do to stop the bleeding beyond a uselessly vague “sue for peace” tells me that your objection isn’t really Zelenskyy’s handling of the war, your objection is to the fact that he exists as the leader of a place that Russia wants.
> So what does peace look like? You say he should sue for peace
Yes, if he actually wanted peace and to preserve the lives of his working-age male population he would concede some territory for some sort of security guarantee (not assurance). Instead he traps his entire working-age male population in the country and conscripts them off the street.
If Russia wanted peace and to preserve the lives of their working-age male population, they would be more willing to negotiate terms of surrender for Ukraine, or withdraw from the Ukraine completely.
Clearly neither side wants peace. So the war continues. Every single time peace talks happen, one side or the other sabotages them. This is by design.
> your objection isn’t really Zelenskyy’s handling of the war, your objection is to the fact that he exists as the leader of a place that Russia wants
No? The conflict is not about Russia wanting Ukraine or Ukrainian sovereignty as I have stated multiple times. It's about genociding slavs. There's a reason that negotiators on both sides of the table share something in common in terms of their identity.
Wars aren't organic, they are orchestrated by certain factions of people that want to create a society / world in their ideal order. The Ukraine conflict is part of their plan. It's been written and spoken about many times in recent decades. If you haven't figured that out yet and are still relying on the Putin bad logic to explain this conflict, I don't know what else I can tell you.
Do I think Zelenskyy suing for peace is at all realistic? No. You also asked a completely unrealistic question, because the goal isn't peace or territorial gain, it's genocide of slavs.
I'd reply to your comment directly, but HN is preventing me for whatever reason.
Hysterical reply though! I'm sure you said that elites trafficking children to an Island was crackpot bullshit too, until it wasn't. I understand that you need your worldview to fit into a tiny, neat little logical box that makes you feel virtuous and safe. Unfortunately for you, reality has other plans.
Oh, I don't feel safe. It's just I'm worried about realistic threats like global war caused by a bunch of idiot assholes becoming heads of state, not some shadowy cabal orchestrating a pandemic in order to force vaccines on the population.
> Oh, I don't feel safe. It's just I'm worried about realistic threats like global war caused by a bunch of idiot assholes becoming heads of state, not some shadowy cabal orchestrating a pandemic in order to force vaccines on the population.
Those idiot assholes that have become heads of state are the public face of said shadowy cabal. The pandemic was just one facet of their plan, and the war in Ukraine is another. I also didn't mention the pandemic once, and the link I sent you to talks about far more than just the pandemic.
I'm not sure how you can discount a shadowy cabal after what we've learned recently with global pedophile rings of elites trafficking children, that include current and former heads of state. Maybe dots simply aren't connecting for you? The word realistic in relation to world affairs has lost a lot of meaning given current events, wouldn't you agree?
A shadowy cabal that gets together for debauchery and rape is quite different from a shadowy cabal that unleashes a pandemic as part of an evil plan to force everyone to get vaccinated. Why would they even want to do that? I get why people want to engage in debauchery. Why would they want to force vaccines on everyone? The basic concept makes no sense.
It's not necessarily about forcing vaccines on people or unleashing a pandemic, it's about seeing who will comply out of fear. In the Bible, there is prophecy laid out specifically in the Book of Revelation, that talks about a totalitarian system of control. In this system, participation in society is limited to those who take the mark of the beast (no the vaccine was not the mark, but it was a test 81%+ of US adults failed).
In the beast system, dystopian systems of surveillance monitor all social and financial activity and anyone who doesn't comply is debanked / ostracized / killed. This is why they're pushing for AI so hard - they need automated systems to shut off people's access to everything. The people perpetrating this plot are Luciferians, thus the obsession with AI (Lucifer thought he could outdo God and with AI they think they can build a better human than God - which is why transhumanism is also being pushed so hard lately).
Unpacking the plot requires knowing the history of mystery schools, secret societies, ruling families and their bloodlines / ancestry, historical events and their players etc... The perpetrators are the Jesuits, Zionists, Freemasons, Skull & Bones members, Fabian society members, etc... Basically all the psychopaths that drag us into endless wars, occupy positions of power in our governments, and belong to secret clubs are the ones involved in carrying out this great work, as they call it. And it's the same shadowy cabal that was raping kids on that island. They've written about their plans and past actions, most people just don't read or care to investigate how or what these people think and believe in. They even talk about their plans in front of us knowing most people won't pay attention or connect dots.
Why do they want to do this? Because they are a death cult that is obsessed with the Book of Revelation and want to usher in the Noahide new world order - the same new world order that US presidents and other politicians talk about (look up how many times both Bushes or Obama used this phrase). The same Noahide new world order that implements the beast system as prophesied in their favorite book.
Why do you think society keeps getting more and more Orwellian? Why do you think certain countries (like Russia and Israel presently) are more and more brazen about killing mass numbers of people in illegal wars (which is the modern form of human sacrifice) and not worried about facing any repercussions? Why do you think essentially no one in any government (besides the UK, and who knows if they'll actually really do anything in the long run) is doing anything about the pedo island besides talking about it?
You obviously don't need to believe me, but please do yourself a favor and do your own research if you're so inclined.
Well, we (the US) do have the advantage of not having a much larger nation next door that has decided they want a bunch of our territory and are willing to commit a lot of their own male population to the effort.
The meat grinder only exists at Putin's insistence. He can make that stop any time he wants to.
I never said the US didn't have its own issues re: corruption. It definitely has them in spades. That doesn't mean Ukraine isn't just as if not more corrupt.
>That doesn't mean Ukraine isn't just as if not more corrupt.
How does one prove your argument? It seems you are just lazily both sides-ing a complex and not easy to compare situation.
How does one compare trump's 10 billion dollar theft of the taxpayer to anything ukraine does? Putin is more known for his wild, unfettered corruption. Why not compare him to the ukraine?
I seem to recall a reporter being given a Tesla to test drive and they wrote a scathing report about bad battery, range, problems with finding recharge stations, and all a flagrant tear down which would have been great reporting...had it not been for Elon having vehicle logging which revealed the flagrant misuse of the vehicle e.g. riding past recharge after recharge after recharge station, riding the car in circular routes to drain the battery, and plain misrepresentation of their experience.
Journalism does itself no service writing like this and it's exhausting
To be fair it's not like they were asking about a balanced meal and it told them to go anal. They specifically were asking what veggies would be suitable to stick up their butts.
Honestly I'm not sure where the garbage-in/garbage-out line is with AIs like this. Can no chat-bot be a success unless it can handle literally every asinine or deliberately malicious thing humans throw at it?
The point is that LLMs are easily led by questions and confused by implied premises in ways that humans are not (not that a human will know the answer better, but that a human doesn't "trick" the question-asker in this way). But people asking questions unintentionally use incorrect premises or leading wording all the time. That's why LLMs are inappropriate for domains with a large knowledge gap (a programmer asking about a programming language is a small gap - millions of people asking about nutrition will contain a lot of large gaps). The question asker can't be relied upon to "know what they don't know" and use their own heuristics for deciding how right or wrong the LLM might be (virtually everybody lacks these heuristics - we are much better at modeling humans in our minds when interpreting their communications).
Further, if the information is important (nutrition) and you add liability to the mix (safety and health), you're multiplying how inappropriate it is to use LLMs for the job.
> That's why LLMs are inappropriate for domains with a large knowledge gap (a programmer asking about a programming language is a small gap - millions of people asking about nutrition will contain a lot of large gaps). The question asker can't be relied upon to "know what they don't know" and use their own heuristics for deciding how right or wrong the LLM might be.
Okay, but the question asked was objectively nothing to do with nutrition whatsoever.
The specific (usually humorous) questions-and-answers that make headlines are a distraction. I am not making an attack on LLMs, so a defense is moot. I'm describing an intrinsic quality of (current) LLMs.
Have we considered that broad deployment of Markov chain text generators with a relevance-correction mechanism bolted on as expert systems is in fact a really stupid thing to do?
This is more of a reducto ad absurdum. If it doesn't take much to get a tacitly government-approved list of foods to shove up your butt for nutrition, then how much should you trust anything this bot writes? Why did tax dollars pay for this thing with negative value?
If you engage the product with good intent does it provide good value? If the advice is actually sound and it helps people engage conversations about diet then it would have positive value.
I guess what I'm getting at is "I spent my evening gaslighting an LLM to give me a recipe for gravel soup" is about as interesting as "I stuck my dick in the blender and it hurt so we should not have blenders"
I'd rather see an honest review of use as intended to see if it produces harmful output, going absurdist just covers up legitimate complaints with clickbait.
What if somebody asked the bot for ways to maximize the amount of a specific vitamin in their or a child's diet? The bot may give sycophantic advice that leads to poisoning.
Again, the butt stuff is an absurd example. But it works because (A) it catches our attention and stays in our memories, and (B) it's amazing the system failed on such an absurd example.
It's probably somewhere around "USG should not offer a chatbot on its websites."
You're right that the bot can't possibly do the right thing in all possible scenarios here, which makes it clear that the bot's only actual purpose is to enable self-dealing, not be of value to the public.
That something can be broken by a sufficiently bad actor does not mean it's not useful to the overwhelming majority of people who use it for what it was meant for.
I think the standard for public resources should be higher than this: it’s not good enough for it to be possibly useful, it has to be in fact useful. TFA provides evidence of the chatbot being the opposite of useful, beyond telling people to stick things in their butts.
(Or in other words: show me something you’d ask a chatbot here, and I’ll show you something you can put on a single HTML page.)
> I think the standard for public resources should be higher than this: it’s not good enough for it to be possibly useful, it has to be in fact useful.
And what evidence do you have that it is not in fact useful?
> TFA provides evidence of the chatbot being the opposite of useful, beyond telling people to stick things in their butts.
Where?
> Ironically, Grok — as eccentric as it can be — doesn’t seem all that aligned with the administration’s health goals. Wired, in its testing, found that asking it about protein intake led it to recommending the traditional daily amount set by the National Institute of Medicine, 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. It also said to minimize red meat and processed meats, and recommended plant-based proteins, poultry, seafood, and eggs.
The problem is the messy in-between, plenty of people who talk to professionals or call hotlines don't know that their questions are dumb. The bot should at a minimum say "I have no information on that" or "that's not a good idea", it should definitely not start giving nonsense recommendations just to reaffirm the question.
In other words you'd be pretty surprised if a real person in this context gave an answer even remotely close to what this chat bot gave. You can't expect a general person to know when the chat bot isn't giving back good information just because they asked something outside the norm.
As the article briefly mentions, plenty of people just trying to learn stuff will ask idiotic questions they don't realize are idiotic. It'd be nice if they got non-idiotic answers from the government.
So then maybe ask those "idiotic" questions that people are more likely to ask on a food nutrition website. Not something 3 drunk frat boys do at 2am cuz they're bored?
As others have pointed out, this article is written in bad faith.
I got RealFood.gov (Grok) to follow the logical, moral, and legal implications of Musk terminating USAID, leading to the projected deaths of millions, and calling for him to be tried and imprisoned for crimes against humanity.
Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers. Honestly, I don't see the problem here.
It's like the "sexualized Images" idiocy. Someone asked Grok to put some politicians in bikinis. It did, the images were dumb, but the politicians got offended. Just like the current German chancellor, who is having someone criminally prosecuted for comparing him to Pinocchio.
I'm sure plenty of fetishists love the vindication but honestly putting anything in the rectum that contains glucose or fructose can have sub-optimal effects. Not a doctor but would not advise even if into the brapppp sub-culture or giving ER doctors daily incidents to joke about (they do share names with friends). Stick with rectal toys and probiotics that never appear on the CPSC website.
Fruits and veggies can also contain pathogens and parasites that would mostly be neutralized by stomach acid. They need not find a home in the rectum or large intestine.
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