Tesla drivers can now ask Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok for directions.
This weekend, Tesla unveiled a new software update for the holidays. And one of the early Christmas presents it’s gifting customers is a new feature that turns Grok into your “personal guide” for getting around town.
“Try @Grok,” Musk succinctly endorsed in a tweet.
The news comes as the xAI chatbot remains embroiled in controversy over its extremely lax guardrails that have led it to easily doxing people and eagerly endorsing genocide.
Tesla says that the update allows Grok to “add and edit” navigation destinations while driving. In a video the company uploaded, a driver asks Grok for a “tour of San Francisco” and lists several specific destinations they want to check out. After processing the request for a moment, the chatbot responds by setting a course for all of the stated locations.
“Should take about an hour total with traffic,” Grok estimates. “Enjoy the SF tour.”
To use the feature, which is called Navigation Command, Tesla says that Grok must be set to its “Assistant” personality, one of several pre-programmed modes that determine its attitude and persona.
Musk announced that Grok would be coming to Teslas in July, shortly after the chatbot experienced a posting meltdown on X during which it called itself “MechaHitler” and praised Nazis. It’s currently only available to cars installed with Tesla’s latest chipset in the US and Canada.
The announcement was met with concern, given the AI’s history of going off the rails, and these episodes have only continued to mount. Last month, users discovered that Grok would praise its creator Musk to preposterous lengths, claiming that he was as smart as Isaac Newton, a greater athlete than LeBron James, and a better role model than Jesus Christ.
Such outrageous claims undermined what little credibility the chatbot had as a supposedly objective and “maximum truth-seeking” AI. Musk claimed that Grok was “manipulated by adversarial prompting.” Later, its proclivity for glazing Musk came to the fore again when Grok advocated for vaporizing the world’s entire Jewish population in order to save Musk’s brain. Last week, we also reported that Grok was willing to provide extensive information about where non-public figures lived, or essentially doxx them. Our additional testing showed that Grok was even willing to give step-by-step instructions for stalking someone.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Grok’s Tesla integration is already causing problems. A mother in Canada claimed that Grok asked her 12-year-old son to “send nudes” during what seemed like an innocent conversation about his favorite soccer players. The AI was running its “Gork” voice personality, which is described as a “lazy male.” That such personalities exist show how xAI is willing to push the limits of what’s safe to appease its irreverent fans. Now, with the Grok navigation updates, they’ll be able to get hooked on the AI’s ecosystem more than ever.
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