SZA took to her Instagram Story on Tuesday to issue a firm critique of artificial intelligence. In doing so, she shared a meme of The X-Files’ character, Dana Scully, with the words: “Yeah, I use AI. Actual Imagination.” As caught by Complex, she captioned the picture: “AI is killing and polluting Black and Brown cities. None of you care ‘cause [you’re] codependent on a machine. Have a great life.”
SZA's post comes after Elon Musk's AI firm, xAI, announced that it won a $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense. According to The Guardian, the company will be developing and implementing artificial intelligence tools for the agency.
“Under the umbrella of Grok For Government, we will be bringing all of our world-class AI tools to federal, local, state, and national security customers,” xAI said in a statement on its website. “These customers will be able to use the Grok family of products to accelerate America – from making everyday government services faster and more efficient to using AI to address unsolved problems in fundamental science and technology.”
Back in April, xAI came under fire for its Memphis data center, which locals claim has allegedly become one of the biggest air polluters in the entire county. It's situated near multiple historically Black neighborhoods, according to The Guardian. At the facility, the company is working on a supercomputer to power the Grok chatbot.
Grok "MechaHitler"
The Department of Defense isn't the only reason xAI has been in the news as of late. The aforementioned Grok chatbot recently caused backlash for the company by making several antisemitic posts on X (formerly Twitter) and even referring to itself as "MechaHitler." At one point, Grok also provided tips on sexually assaulting one user.
Afterward, the company issued an apology. “First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced," they wrote. “Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok. We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse."
