Word of Grok, we praise you Lord

The journalists of the Efe agency are rightly upset with Grok, because it said that a video they had just uploaded about a bombing in a girls' school in Iran was actually an old clip filmed in Kabul. This was not the case, but the damage was already done and the correction admitting the error did not go viral, while the erroneous verification still runs through the happy fields of immoderate social internet. What's more: the statement from Efe's professional committee lamenting that a monkey with a shotgun like Grok –amusing and useful at times, but dangerous– has been met by the classic profiles of the Spanish flag and the gallant bio with an avalanche of offensive comments or where errors of the service are recalled.

We have reached the end of the road. No one says that the media are perfect. But those that are serious, and Efe is, have clear policies with errors: admit them without reservation and ensure that they do not spread further. On the other hand, social networks shrug their shoulders and say “algorithm stuff”, as if their hallucinations were inevitable and impossible to mitigate. If we add to this the host of enlightened people who, even if you present them with the evidence, persist in criticizing you, we have the perfect closed system by which any possibility of building a minimum social consensus based on factuality is destroyed. And Elon Musk and the rest of the technoligarchy know this. They sell the idea of the autonomous and democratic algorithm when it is neither one nor the other: a bad thing, to believe that it can be the arbiter of any truth given how it has been programmed. That said: it is convincing and knows how to deceive well. It could adopt that maxim of Chico Marx, in Duck Soup, when he said to Margaret Dumond: “And whom will you believe, me or your own eyes?”. Each time, more of the congregation is willing to answer: “You, Grok, of course you”.