Comment:

The less I say about the "late Maga period" and the unsettling way that supposedly serious authority figures can be made to talk like 4chan trolls from 2010, the better. I'm just going to point out that if you were ever curious why Rosenthal's classrooms all look like tiered pews, today's strip hints at an answer: those ranbow pads are a lot more adaptable and accessible than they look.

Transcript:

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0409– 2167/07/07/12:14 - Rosenthal College, Delta building, classroom 0109
JB: Alright, I’ve sent each of you a copy of Grok, go ahead and test out a few of the “prompts” we discussed, or try your own. Don’t worry, these Groks are safely contained within a larger actual AI that will make sure you don’t accidentally generate hate speech or other obscenities… which was a thing that happened!
JB: As you play around, consider that all the vast stores of text, images, and music that Grok was “trained” on were not yet, at the time, in the public domain, and the original artists were rarely, if ever, compensated for this use of their work.
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JB: Also, consider that each individual query would have used up what was, in the twenty-twenties, quite a significant amount of processing power and electrical energy!
HA: Was this before or after the invention of modern solar panels?
JB: During. Climate change was very much not yet a solved problem, and many people blamed the widespread use of these algorithms for exacerbating it.
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JB: Now, remember: these early generators were essentially black boxes. There was no way to see why any given prompt resulted in the specific response that it did. Even if you ask Grok to trace its own logic, as with everything else, it’ll simply output something that looks correct! Of course, in our case, the container AI will be able to show you the real answer.
Fluff Greenwood: Uh… Mezzer Barrowsmith? Do these generators already have our personal information loaded into them?
JB: They shouldn’t, why do you ask?
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FG: Because mine keeps calling me a “pedo”, and if that’s not a reference to the fact that I’m currently a quadruped, then I’m really not sure what it’s talking about.
JB: Ah, I see the container AI isn’t set to block obscenities that no longer exist, I’m going to have to tweak that, my apologies.
JB: We won’t be discussing late Maga period rhetoric in this class, and I don’t recommend you look it up, but let’s just say “pedo” is old-timey slang for “I disagree with your politics” and leave it at that.
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