If you were weirded out by the extreme close-up convicted rapist Mike Tyson Real Food Super Bowl ad, prepare yourself for new heights—or perhaps depths?—of unpleasant feelings about the whole affair.
No, it’s not because the ad was directed by credibly accused sex pest (and Epstein files denizen, of course) Brett Ratner, fresh off his stunning triumph with “Melania.” While repulsive, that’s pretty much par for the course for this administration. No, it’s because the official government website, realfood.gov, has a section where you can “Use AI to get real answers about real food.”
Since this is on an official fancy government website and is an official government initiative, surely whatever AI tool is being used must have been trained extensively on health information and have multiple safeguards in place to ensure it will provide healthy, correct advice, right?
Uh, no. It’s Grok. It was always going to be Grok. After NextGov asked about why Grok was giving out official nutrition info on an official government website, the administration simply swapped out “Use Grok to get real answers about real food” for “Use AI to get real answers about real food,” but it still just kicks you right over to Grok after you ask your question.
There’s no warning telling you that you are leaving an official government website, no disclaimer that a random chatbot may provide unsafe or incorrect answers. Though a spokesperson told NextGov that the “publicly available version of Grok” is “also an approved governmental tool,” they didn’t feel like answering questions about how Grok was chosen, whether there is a contract, or what guardrails are in place.
404 Media reported that people quickly figured out you could ask Grok to give you dangerously stupid advice, such as what foods are most comfortable to stick up your butt. Guess there aren’t any guardrails, huh?
In case you’re not feeling that adventurous, the realfood site also has suggested prompts of imaginary people desperate for REAL FOOD, which is somehow always in all caps: “My aging parent lives alone, is on a fixed income, and mostly eats frozen dinners and packaged snacks. I’m worried they’re not getting REAL FOOD, but they don’t cook much anymore. How can I help them get more REAL FOOD without it being complicated or expensive?”
It appears you are supposed to cut and paste this into the Grokbox and get helpful answers. Doing that with the above prompt gets you the same sort of bog-standard information you would get from a web search: look for senior food programs like Meals on Wheels, try some no-cook healthy meals like Greek yogurt, and so on.
Well, at least that’s not Grok generating child sexual abuse material or telling you to put a zucchini up your ass. Small blessings.
f you ask more than a handful of questions via the realfood Grok prompt, you get a message telling you that you have reached the message limit and that you need to sign up with Grok to continue.
So, an official government website is sending people to a sketchy chatbot owned and controlled by the world’s richest man, and the only way you can take advantage of this oh-so-helpful official government tool is to give your personal information to Elon Musk. Great. That’s a totally normal and cool way for government to work.
Grok is also burrowing in at the Department of Defense, but this appears to be the first use of Musk’s nonconsensual sexual deepfake machine in the Health and Human Services Department.
In a normal world, HHS would presumably want to make sure that people were receiving helpful, accurate, expert information about what foods to eat, but under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the entire idea of expertise is suspect. “Trusting the experts is not a feature of democracy and it’s not a feature of science; it’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism.”
Man, that is bleak.
So, don’t listen to experts. Instead, listen to Grok. Listen to Mike Tyson. Listen to RFK Jr. cosplaying as Mike Tyson? This stuff isn’t just dangerous. It’s offensive.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
