Matthew Kirschenbaum: "In this, as Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans have argued, large language models [LLMs] are in line with previous 'cultural technologies' such as the printing press and libraries, or for that matter Wikipedia, all of which can also be utilized in bad faith. In what follows, however, I want to suggest that as a cultural technology, Grok manifests certain specific affordances which make it into something more. Grok is an intentional instrument for establishing, maintaining, and manipulating a consensus reality on X, a self-contained and self-sustaining discourse environment with at least a quarter of a billion daily users; coupled with the apparent eugenicist white-supremacist proclivities of its owner, this makes it in my view uniquely dangerous. Grok, in short, is an epistemic weapon."
"Its mechanisms should be taken apart under bright lights, in much the same way people learn how to defuse a bomb."
Kirschenbaum also notes: "The term epistemic weapon was coined, as best I can tell, by the British philosopher Richard Pettigrew, who uses it as a concept to denote abstract categories like gaslighting or lying. "