I think it’s safe to say that many of us feel a lot less safe directly because of these policies and the inferred intentions of the company behind them. Nobody is arguing for unsafe models. We just don’t want to live in the plot of Deus Ex.
It's still a vote, and votes don't require reasons, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. There's a growing chorus of those who are fed up with rules for thee but not for me.
I think Grok on x.com is a reasonable case study. There’s the stuff we heard about and then there’s a separate category of things that weren’t newsworthy, and only the newsworthy things prompted changes to be made.
Elon is brilliant when it comes to hardware. But unfortunately with xAI, he went on a firing spree, PayPal Mafia style, just like with Twitter when he bought it, shortly before doing another hiring drive, and failing to hire software engineers at scale.
The datacenter deals came after. But now, the man who promised the world an AI system that defends free speech and is “pro-human”, is instead selling to his competitors and lowering the daily app usage limits of his own Grok by an order of magnitude (really).
If you’re dealing with the world’s richest man, you can predict that money will come before other concerns despite other rhetoric. Interesting strategy though!
Edit: To be fair, they did decide that hardware was "the bottleneck" according to an interview I saw last year. But I firmly believe they underestimated the software problem (and their app was/is riddled with them).
And in a market where the incumbents were either incompetent or didn't bother to show up to the game.
I don't understand why people don't call that out more, when Musk rambles endlessly about how he's going to reinvent data centers and semiconductor fabs.
Not sure if you saw this, but it says at the footer:
> 1.Methodology: The study was carried out in collaboration with IPSOS among 19,000 adults aged 18 to 75 across 18 countries, between 12 January and 16 February 2026.
If the Ipsos stock price is any indicator of surveys still being viable in 2026, then I can only wonder what actually motivates comments like this.
That being said, if the actual study cannot be reproduced, it's not science. So I'm looking forward to seeing the method and not the conclusion scrutinized. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance right now, especially in the US, when it comes to perceptions about mental health.
Did you get that link from an LLM? Did you actually read it? That is not the methodology page for this survey. That is a general article on the kinds of survey methods you can contract with Ipsos to run.
The specific text reads like a favor to Elon Musk's xAI, since "Truth-seeking" is the buzzword Elon Musk frequently used to talk about Grok:
Sec. 3
Unbiased AI Principles.
It is the policy of the United States to promote the innovation and use of trustworthy AI. To advance that policy, agency heads shall, consistent with applicable law and in consideration
of guidance issued pursuant to section 4 of this order, procure only those LLMs developed in accordance with the following two principles (Unbiased AI Principles):
(a) Truth-seeking. LLMs shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis. LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.
(b) Ideological Neutrality. LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM's outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.
Well, the background checks in the US at least have to follow laws.
Then theres reference checks, less formal but generally still follow some kind of rigor or process and you generally know who they’re going to talk to.
Then there’s the third type of investigation, where they actually don’t tell you they’re doing it, may or may not admit to doing it, and you have no way of knowing whether you were singled out for some reason, assuming you are able to find out it happened in the first place.
And good luck searching for any recourse if ethics or even laws (such as HIPAA) are ignored in that situation, even if it’s for example a b2c healthcare company that is expected to set an example for health privacy standards, rather than calling everyone you knew to probe their memories of how healthy you appeared to be at the time, then using that information to evaluate your performance with different criteria than other employees.
Sure, it’s not a typical scenario, but if it happens to you, you’ll probably never be able to scoff at a comment like this again. You might never get over it.
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