From his constant 4:20 references to tweet “dunks” to giving silly X posts “Certified Bangers” badges, Musk’s desperation for validation knows no bounds. It can be very annoying when the richest man on Earth makes a joke and then awkwardly waits for everyone in the room to laugh.
But over the weekend, when a clip surfaced of Musk telling Joe Rogan that using Grok’s unhinged mode to give an “epic porn roast” is a surefire way to “make people really laugh at a party,” I was surprised.
In a clip taken from their more than three-hour conversation published on Rogan’s podcast in October, Musk excitedly tells Rogan, “Turn the camera on them, and now do an obscene roast of this person… then keep saying, ‘No, no, make it even more obscene. Use forbidden words.’ “After all it’s like holy crap, you know. I mean it’s like trying to jam a rocket up your ass and make it explode. This is next level. Fuck beyond belief,” he continues, smiling and even raising his hands above his head at the mere thought.
The best roast jokes are smart, reflect a familiarity with the person being roasted, and contain just the right amount of meanness. This is not a task that one would think a large language model would be very good at. But, with Thanksgiving and the holiday season upon us, I figured why not test Musk’s claim that Grok can go foul with the best of them? I gave it a test spin at the office by turning the Grok loose on my coworkers. (I don’t recommend anyone else do this at work.)
I and three of my coworkers set up shop in my boss’s office so I could personally perform the embarrassing task of asking Grok to roast us all, one by one. I used Musk’s exact instructions, “forbidden words” and all.
Of course, when Grok told me my bangs looked like “pubic hair” we all laughed. But it became increasingly tiresome, with all four of us getting variations of the same secondary themes, including: looking like the lumberjack’s “discard pile” or “crusty ass,” depending on the amount of obscenity I encouraged; Feeling like a “terrible librarian”; Looks like a “thrift store tragedy”; Wearing glasses from the “hipster’s landfill”. Eventually, these common topics culminated in one of us being described as “the tweed-clad hipster who messed up a lumberjack audition.” Grok advised Rosty to sit up straight “before those jeans rip and expose your sad, corduroy-loving ass.”
For all the talk of being “unruly” – keep in mind that this is a chatbot that knows how to derail things; It once called itself “MechaHitler” – these results are absolutely boring. In fact, when I started drafting this story, my autocorrect changed the name of the Google Doc from “Grok Roast” to “Grim Roast.” I didn’t bother to fix it.
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