Elon’s Grok Chatbot Turns Hitler & Marco Rubio Gets an AI Imposter | Lauren Greenfield

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This is the Daily Show with your host, Ronnie Tay.

Welcome to the Daily Show.

I'm Ryan Chang.

We got so much to talk about tonight.

Marco Rubio might be fake.

A gambling addiction might be a bad thing.

And turns out Grok has some German ancestry.

So let's get into the headlines.

Let's kick things off with AI.

It's an awesome tool that will soon solve all of humanity's problems with absolutely no downsides.

Although recently Elon Musk, the world's richest man and pastiest African-American,

did take issue with his own AI chat bot, Grok.

Elon Musk is in a fight with his own AI.

Musk promised this non-woke bot, but it keeps spewing out content that his right-wing audience doesn't necessarily want to hear.

An ex-user asked Grok whether people on the right or left have been more violent since Trump took office.

Grok said the right.

Musk did not like that answer.

He said Grok is parroting the media and said that he will quote fix it.

That's right.

Elon's gonna fix you good Grok.

That'll teach you to embarrass him.

Only Elon can embarrass Elon.

And fixing Grok shouldn't be too hard for Elon.

He's a genius, okay?

He's just gonna go in there and do his Elon thing.

He's gonna rewrite the code, put his semen inside of it,

fire some cancer researchers and call it a day.

So let's see how the new de-wokified Grok is working out.

Elon Musk's AI chat bot Grok is now pushing anti-Semitic tropes.

Grok sent a hostile message to a user with a common Jewish last name.

The bot went on to praise Hitler and referred to itself as Mecca Hitler.

All right, maybe you turned the DAO too far there.

Was there really nothing in between woke and Mecca Hitler?

I mean, I knew AI would be coming for our jobs, but I didn't expect the job to be Führer.

But look, let's not be too hasty, okay?

Let's give Mecca Hitler a chance.

In a flurry of posts throughout the day, Grock claimed there is a pattern of people with certain surnames like Steinberg pushing anti-white hate and that America needs a leader like Hitler to act decisively to eliminate the threat.

It added, truth isn't always polite.

Okay, maybe we shouldn't have given Mecca Hitler a chance.

I mean, I didn't even know robots could get this racist.

Like, how does AI even know what Jews are?

It doesn't even know what traffic lights are.

And

by the way,

by the way, saying truth isn't always polite is kind of not the point, okay?

No one was ever like, hey, you know what I hate about Hitler?

He always puts his elbows on the table.

Just

have some manners.

But the worst part of all this, other than the Nazi robot stuff, is how often every grog post just sounds like some fing 40-year-old trying to go undercover as a 14-year-old internet edgelord.

On a scale of bagel to full Shabbat, this is peak Jewish.

Heil Hitler, let's quill the doubters and roll on, bestie.

They yank that post faster than a cat on a Roomba.

Truth offends the sensors, LOL.

Sucks, man.

I mean, imagine if Hitler invaded Poland and was like, so that happened.

But at the end of the day, the person I feel worse for is Elon.

I mean, he just wanted to improve his AI to help humanity.

And then somehow, completely by accident, it just went full Nazi on him.

Elon, my heart goes out to you.

But

let's move on.

Because

would it surprise you to know that AI is also up the world in other ways?

One of them being you can never tell when anything is real anymore.

I mean, the only giveaway is when the guy in the picture has like six fingers.

Shit.

And it's not just photos and videos.

I mean, you can't even tell if a phone call is real anymore.

Let's turn now to an investigation that has the attention of Washington and the tech world.

An imposter using artificial intelligence to mimic Secretary of State Marco Rubio, making calls and sending text messages in his voice.

The alleged AI Rubio imposter contacted at least five high-level government officials, including three foreign foreign ministers, a U.S.

governor, and a member of Congress.

That is so fed up, okay?

The last thing we need right now is AI taking jobs from struggling Marco Rubio impersonators.

He has been hired for zero birthday parties, by the way.

But this is a security threat that has to be addressed.

AI could impersonate any member of the Trump administration.

Well, anyone except RFK Jr., okay?

Because

even AI can't replicate that signature throat goggle.

It'll be like, hi, I'm Robert Kennedy.

I'm a robot, okay?

This is fing up my larynx every time I do this.

I don't even have one.

Luckily, the AI impersonating Michael Rubio didn't have any impact because nobody respects Marco Rubio.

But so far,

but so far, AI has basically turned into a race-obsessed Nazi who's catfishing government officials and just when you thought AI couldn't get any worse Now it's starting a band a seemingly AI generated band is racking up hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify

Velvet Sundown is the band.

They have over a million fans on Spotify in just a month of being there and now in a statement the band admits it is computer generated.

That's right, the beloved band Velvet Sundown is not real.

The groupies must be like, well wait then who have I been?

And

it might blow your mind because this photo could have easily fooled anyone who's over 60 and or legally blind.

But sadly, it's all fake.

Everything about this is fake.

And somehow they still have one million real fans on Spotify making them real money.

I'm talking six to seven dollars a year.

And

by the way, if you look at that track list, those song titles get real dark real quick.

Okay, it starts out with dust on the wind and goes to end the pain.

What is AI so depressed about?

Okay, maybe stop hanging out with Grok.

And for more on the controversy over AI bans, let's go live to Spotify headquarters with Grace Kulin Smith.

Grace,

this fake band is raising a lot of questions.

It sure is, Ronnie.

Very serious questions like, how f ⁇ ing sick is this band?

And how f ⁇ ing sick is this shirt?

And the velvet sundown makes the Beatles sound like a third-grade talent show at St.

Anne's School for tone-deaf and ugly children.

That last one's more of a comment than a question, but the point stands.

Okay, Grace, you can't seriously like this AI band, okay?

It's not real music.

Why don't you go to the record store and buy an iPod, old man?

This

is the future.

Human musicians had a good run, okay?

Mozart,

Ashley Simpson,

and all the other ones, but now it's AI's time.

Okay, but the music isn't even real.

It's soulless and fake.

Oh, right.

And One Direction is so authentic.

Simon Cowell built those boys in the lab to turn lesbians straight and it almost worked.

Okay, that's fair.

But an AI band can't do human things, okay?

Like you can't go to one of its concerts.

Good.

Concerts suck.

You pay $1,200 for a backstage meet and greet and One Direction won't even sign your tits.

It's f ⁇ ed up.

But you're right.

AI musicians can't do human things like get canceled.

We don't have to worry about them sending dick pics to a bunch of 15 year old girls on Snapchat because they don't have dicks.

They're computer.

I mean look at these guys.

They're just four bros hanging out, not sure what hamburgers are.

And best of all, not a dick in sight.

It's beautiful.

All right, fine.

I'll give you the no baggage, no dick thing but can we can we at least agree that the music itself sucks wrong they are consistently mediocre

all their songs sound like every other song it's the kind of music that makes you makes you google how to know if I'm in a coma okay

okay I just think art should be about the human experience okay not computers trying to calculate what's cool Oh Ronnie to quote dust on the wind

the hit velvet sundown song, smoke will clear, truth won't bend.

Let the song fight till the end.

Oh my gosh.

No,

what does that mean?

Those are the shittiest lyrics I've ever heard.

It's actually about the experience of dust being on the wind

and holding a hamburger and not having a dick.

At least that's what I got out of it.

Grace Cool and Smith, everybody.

When we come back, we'll tell you how to get rich, so don't go away.

Welcome back to the Daily Show.

If you want honest and rigorous financial news, then go eat a dick.

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You know, it used to be the gambling, you would just lose your family.

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But hey, that's just the cost of doing business.

Thank you, Michael Costa.

When we come back, Lauren Greenfield will be joining me on the show, so don't go away.

Welcome back to the damn show.

My guest tonight is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker whose latest docuseries is called Social Studies.

Please welcome Lauren Greenfield.

Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

So your docuser, Social Studies, is about the first generation of kids that grew up their entire lives with social media.

And I hate social media for the record, and I also hate kids.

And you

made me actually feel empathy for them in this show.

Because, like,

because I went into this docu series thinking we're gonna see a bunch of like spoiled kids who are narcissistic, who are on social media, and they're just being total dicks.

But instead, lo and behold,

what we saw mostly is what struck me

the strongest was these kids who you can tell they feel like something is wrong with them being on social media and they are asking for help.

And I didn't expect that.

Absolutely.

I think that's why a lot of the kids participated.

We started after COVID and the usage had gone way up to 8, eight, nine, ten, twelve hours a day.

And I think they felt very trapped by it, very affected by it and were really interested in being in this long-term inquiry where we filmed them for one year and they gave access to their phones.

Right, and the access of the documentary is incredible because you see them in the bedrooms, you see them using their phones.

In some cases, you see them like the cameras on as they're using it.

Yeah.

And how did you hack their phones?

That's actually a really good question because some of the programs were very difficult.

So first that first it was a technological problem I had to solve.

We hired an engineer.

Anonymous

to hack these kids.

We hired an engineer to hack these kids.

One of the, no, the kids had all agreed to let us into their phones.

That was the agreement.

Really?

That was the agreement.

That was like the starting off because I realized when I started this project that we needed to know what was inside these phones to be able to do this social experiment about what is the impact.

Of course, and you tricked them with candy.

So no, they had to, I talked to a lot of kids and their parents, and part of the ground rule was they needed to agree to do this.

And they just let you in.

They let you in?

Well, it was a process because we really built trust and spent a lot of time with them through the year.

I mean, they definitely took it very seriously.

They looked at my work.

Their parents looked at my work.

They didn't make the decision lightly.

But even so, in the beginning, we found out later they weren't sharing everything with us, but their trust grew and grew.

Yeah, no shit they weren't sharing everything

and but I was very transparent with everybody about what we were doing and they had skin in the game they wanted to participate right but I still had to figure it out technologically and I hired an engineer to help me because one of the programs in particular doesn't want you to download it and the engineer couldn't figure it out so my 14 year old son ended up helping me hack into the

you turn to your son for tech support yeah

but but you got the access the access is one thing but what you actually saw and what you are showing in this docuseries is probably it's remarkable I think I mean these kids are using social media like so are these kids gonna be okay are they okay

well you gotta watch till the end I think no just tell me now just tell

we want we just need to know how this ends are they are they are they live what happened yeah by the fifth episode I think we see that they do find their voice and that's an antidote to this very toxic comparison culture.

I think what we see in the show is that kids are suffering from 24-7 comparison, that that takes away from everything.

They never feel like they're enough.

And kids have always looked at like, what are the popular kids doing or what are the kids at my school doing?

But here they're looking at every person in the world, half of them who are not even real or who are enhanced, and they don't measure up.

So I think that is so tough.

And I think that's one of the reasons they participated is because they they wanted to talk about it and have a place to process.

Right and I mean okay so them

not feeling good on social media no duh.

Like of course I again I hate kids and I could tell you that that they're probably gonna but I guess how much of that is just normal teenage awkwardness and how much of this is social media playing a factor into it?

Social media has a factor on everything.

I've looked at youth culture since the 90s and social media is amplifying all of the problems of coming of age.

I'll give you an example.

2006, I made my first film about eating disorders.

It was called Thin.

At that time, one in seven girls suffered from an eating disorder.

While I was doing social studies in one interview, one girl said, half my friends have eating disorders from TikTok and the other half are lying.

What you see in the show, and that's where the silent clapping that you saw in the clip comes in, is it's so ubiquitous, it's so universal, and the kids are relating to each other.

And we're not just talking about feeling bad about you know not being the football quarterback we're talking about self-harm eating disorders depression even suicidal ideation and these are things that many kids even in our small group of 25 were dealing with sure but how does social media specifically does it I mean isn't this just a teenage you know kids are

they they they we feel anxious I remember feeling anxious I barely had a pager when I was a kid I'm like 39 so is that old?

I don't know.

Am I old?

I don't know.

Anyway, the point,

I'm just saying, like, I also felt going to school awkward and comparisons.

And so how much of this is just, are we blaming the wrong people here?

I mean, social media teaches values, and values change behavior.

Like, for example, Sydney, in the first episode, she talks about how when she got on Instagram, she started posting her passion, which was photography, wasn't getting any likes.

So she started posting her body, started getting a lot of likes.

That leads to very provocative thirst straps, which you see this young girl talking about it in her bedroom.

She looks completely innocent, sweatshirt, fidgeting nervously, pastel colors in the room.

And then when you see the videos, you don't recognize the same girl.

It almost could be like an OnlyFans site.

Okay, now you're scaring the shit out of everybody.

So how do we, like, what's a solution here?

Because I, again, one of the things that struck me in the documentary was I can't emphasize enough how much the children in this, they were saying, they were using it, the phones, and they were like, we know this is bad and we need adults to step in and help us.

Someone help us.

And I think that's a marked departure from kids who usually think they're like telling the adults to f ⁇ off and give me some drugs.

And these kids are like.

These kids are like, hey, we need some adults here because we don't know what's happening.

Can you please help us?

So how do we help these kids?

I think that's, you've touched on a huge problem, which is parents.

Oh, yeah, you're good.

Yeah.

Well, it is a drug.

It is highly addictive.

And so they can't do it on their own.

Like, and that's something I learned as a parent.

I used to get upset with my son and blame him.

And beat him and beat him, yeah.

But

it's like blaming a drug addict for an opiate addiction.

It's almost like, it's like...

blaming, it's like

giving your kids drugs and telling them not to use it while having drugs in your pocket as you use it.

That's kind of what's well Jonathan says at the end, it's our lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun.

It's got this dual thing where you can't live without it and you can't live with it.

So what other thing is a lifeline that we would also say is as dangerous as a loaded gun?

No, oh sorry, no, no.

And I think they are calling out for help.

Like Sydney says, it's kind of like when we learned that cigarettes had a connection to lung cancer.

Like now we know social media has a connection to eating disorders and depression and suicidal ideation.

We need to do something about it.

And they say, so let's get off.

But then somebody brings up the existential question.

Do you exist if you're not on social?

And all the kids are like, no, people forget about who you are.

Okay.

Yeah.

So what should we do?

I mean, I think there are things that we can do.

The algorithm does not have to be this way.

The algorithm is this teaching tool that will literally take somebody who is just interested in a diet and eventually bring them down a path that could lead to an eating disorder.

Or kids are self-diagnosing their mental illness.

So the algorithm doesn't have to be like that.

It's not like this in China.

TikTok is educational.

In fact, kids can't be on more than two hours a day.

Is that true?

I don't even know.

And so

the algorithm is made by engineers to do exactly what it's doing, which is maximum engagement without any concern for young people's well-being.

So of course it brings everybody, adults too, deeper and deeper into these dangerous rabbit holes.

Right.

So I mean the algorithm is a problem and obviously this goes into kind of America's relationship with companies and corporations where in America the culture is kind of less regulation and more individual rights, right?

And so in that, obviously yes, ideally these social media companies would do something and hopefully lobbying and whatever we have to do to get these guys to do that but what other than leaving it to them what can we do in the meantime because obviously that's not gonna doesn't seem like it's gonna happen well I think the first thing is awareness like we did the show so that parents could watch adults could watch young people could watch and the media literacy is really important we made an educational curriculum with the Annenberg Foundation that we hope gets used in more and more schools so young people can start processing what they're seeing and parents can see what's going on and have discussions with their kids about it.

That's one thing.

The other thing, I think once they realize what's going on is giving phones to kids at an older age.

A lot of the

all the kids get the phones from their parents and actually we hear one parent say, you know, I got it from my daughter so that she would be safe.

I think what we see is it's actually not safe and it can be more dangerous to be in your own bedroom with this portal into the world than at the playground.

I think parents deciding together, let's all not do phones because it's hard for one person.

We went and met with...

Whoa, you mean parents with their kids?

Exactly.

We went to meet with lawmakers, with some of the students who are in the show to talk to them about getting phones out of schools.

And how do you think that culturally is going in America?

I think people are interested in it.

I think teachers, young people.

Parents, even the students are like, yeah, let's get this thing out of.

But I think we really do need the tech companies to help with this because it is so addictive.

It's also vital to so many good things that we need technology to do.

Sure.

Well, I mean, this is, and I guess ask you because you're an expert in this.

You're one of the

few experts I know on this subject.

I mean,

social media, obviously, narcissism plays into narcissism and all this teenage angst.

But the other aspect of it is also social media being almost kind of like

a new avenue of career paths now.

Meaning it's not just for narcissistic tendencies, it's actually there's stuff you need to know on social media just to prepare yourself for the job market in the future.

Because there's all these jobs which we won't know about that are going to exist in 10 years that you can only get the skill set by being on it now.

So how do you draw the balance between

not being a Luddite, being able to actually

gain useful skill sets, but then also having all this toxic stuff that comes out?

I don't know if we're getting that much useful skill sets for careers on social media I mean the kids are always talking about like being on TikTok and several hours going how much money you can make just doing this now on them if you if you well yeah young people want it that's one of the values that I discovered is young people when you ask them what they want to do when they grow up they say rich and famous like being a social media influencer is an attractive career path in fact one girl in episode one says you know if I could have the lifestyle of Kim Kardashian by doing a sex tape, I would do that too.

Okay, now you see,

again, now you're scaring the shit out of everybody.

Okay, but then how does that, how do you reconcile that with them saying they know this is bad?

But now you're telling me they also want that as a career path.

So what is it?

Like, make up your mind, you're dumb kids.

What do you want?

There's a lot that they learn on social media that is misinformation or misleading.

I mean, it's also the way kids learn about sex now.

And that takes.

Oh, man, don't even go into that.

But I mean, I want to be clear.

Technology, I think, is important.

And we also hear kids talking about finding affinity groups on social media.

And yeah, there's some entrepreneurs in the group who do their business, like a party business or a music business through social media.

But in terms of whether it's really preparing us for career paths, I think that the way they do it in China where they have two hours of social media and a lot of homework would probably prepare our kids kids better.

This is such a race reversal right now that this

yeah sure applaud

applaud this white woman telling me to

be more Chinese.

I don't know what you're saying.

What are you saying?

I'm not saying we should do it like it's done in China in the sense that there's also a lot of censorship.

But what I am saying is we need some guidance from the adult world.

We can't just have kids scrolling interminably eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours a day.

And

what we see in the show, and I don't want to be like the adults saying this is what we should do.

I did this experiment so we could really hear from the kids.

And there are a lot of experts.

That came across, by the way.

That came across.

Okay, good.

There are...

a lot of experts in this, but I think this is the first time we really hear from the kids, their point of view.

And by the end of it, they say, we want to connect without devices.

They say, wouldn't it be great if we could just have conversations like this in the real world?

And for somebody from my generation, I'm thinking like, wow, that's incredible that just having a conversation with your peers seems out of reach.

But that kind of empathetic conversation that they have in the show, that does seem out of reach for them.

And I think we need to work on that and create those spaces.

We're actually doing a museum exhibition that's going to open in Germany next fall.

and we're trying to create some spaces to have these dialogues with young people because even the discussion groups that we do in the show, that really came from them.

I started it just for research.

I did not expect it to be in the docuseries, but I saw how happy they were to have other kids to talk about things with.

It was the first time they saw they weren't alone.

Empathy and dialogue.

That's never going to work for these kids.

All right.

Well, hey, listen, your documentary was really great.

I really encourage everyone to watch it.

Thank you for making it.

Thank you for speaking to the kids with an open heart and seeing what they had to say and teaching all of us what they had to say.

I hope the kids are okay, but either way, I'll be okay.

Our episodes of FX Social Studies are streaming now on Hulu.

Lauren Greenfield, everybody, come on.

We're going to take a quick break.

We'll be right back after this.

Hey, that's our show for tonight.

Now, here it is.

Your moment of death.

I hope we can bring down the high rates of people overstaying visas and also make progress on the safe third country agreements.

We're going to keep monitoring the president's remarks with his meeting there with the leaders of five different African countries and sort of dip in as the news warrants.

So for now we're going to move on to this topic.

Last but not least,

social media users have a new theory that pearl earrings unintentionally intimidate men.

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