Elon Musk Said Grok Grills Would Be ‘Epic’ At Parties – So I Tried It On My Colleagues
We can discuss Elon Musk’s achievements — building Tesla, hollowing out government, shooting for Mars — are merited, but we can all agree that his insistence on being funny is his most important trait.
From constant 4:20 references to tweeting “dunks” quotes to awarding “Certified Bangers” badges to silly X posts, Musk’s desperation for validation knows no bounds. It can be very annoying when the richest man on earth makes a joke and then looks around the room in a weird way waiting for everyone to laugh.
But over the weekend, a clip surfaced of Musk telling Joe Rogan that using Unhinged Grok mode to deliver an “epic vulgar grill” was a surefire way to “make people laugh at a party.”
In a clip from their three-hour conversation, released on Rogan’s podcast in October, Musk excitedly tells Rogan: “Turn the camera on them and now do a vulgar roast of this person … then say, ‘No, no, make it even more vulgar.’ Use no words.” He continues: “Eventually it’s like, shit, you know. I mean, it’s about to shoot a missile up your ass and blow it up. This is the next step. “Beyond damnable belief,” he continues, chuckling and even raising his hands above his head at the mere thought.
The best roast jokes are usually clever, reflect familiarity with the person being roasted, and contain just the right amount of posturing. It is not a task to think that a large model language would excel at it. But, with Thanksgiving and the holiday season on the horizon, I figured why not test Musk’s claim that Grok can deliver a bad-mouth secret with the best of them? I tested it by rolling the grok on my colleagues. (I would not recommend this to anyone else at work.)
Three of my coworkers and I set up shop in my boss’s office so I could privately do the embarrassing thing of telling Grok to grill us all one by one. I used the mask’s detailed instructions, “forbidden words” and all.
Admittedly, we all burst out laughing when Grok told me my bangs looked like “pubic hair.” But it quickly got boring, all four of us getting a variety of the same sophomore dialogue, including: depending on how vulgar I encouraged, I sounded like a lumberjack. Like a “damn librarian”; Similar to a “shopping mall tragedy”; Goggles from the “hipster landfill”. Eventually, these common themes culminated in one of us being described as a tweed-wearing hipster who cursed at a wooden audition. Grok advised the roaster to sit up straight “before those jeans rip and reveal your sad ass and your friend’s pram.”
Despite all the talk about being “smooth”, remember this is a chatbot that knows how to derail things. Once called yourself “Mascha Hitler” – these results are absolutely boring. In fact, when I started drafting this story, autocorrect changed the name of the Google Doc from “Grok roast” to “Grim roast”. I didn’t bother to fix it
