The X social media platform has reinstated its ‘translate post’ option for posts in the Hebrew language, which it had reportedly disabled, supposedly, because its AI, Grok, was being too literal – only with Hebrew, mind you – and making us all wrongly think that Israelis say lots of racist, genocidal, war-criminal stuff, giving the colony a bad rep.

Riighht.

Grok itself helpfully summarised the action that X had taken and claimed that it was doing so to ‘limit inflammatory content spread’ – and that it was not inflammatory because the posts actually contain inflammatory content, but because Grok was being too literal and we were all taking the literalness too, well, literally:

Unfortunately for X, words mean things

As commentator Wally Rashid pointed out, plenty of people were quick to identify examples of this excessively ‘literal’ content, like former US marine Ken O’Keefe:

It’s fair to say that there was a fair degree of skepticism among its users about X’s excuse reasoning:In response to more questioning, Grok admitted that by translating from Hebrew it had been amplifying “calls for violence”, but still claimed that this was because its translations were “inaccurate or literal” – presumably as in ‘literally calling for violence’; it denied that it was “targeting any group” but then slipped up and admitted that the surges had been in “Hebrew hate speech”, not the other languages it was translated into:

Challenged to say whether it had targeted any other languages in the same way, Grok had to admit it had not – mysteriously, only Hebrew posts were the issue – leading to questions about why the hate-posters’ accounts weren’t being deleted as per usual practice:

However, it seems that the widespread scorn and derision was too much of an embarrassment, perhaps because it drew more attention to the flood of genocidal speech from the relatively tiny population of Israeli Hebrew-speakers. At the time of writing, the translation option is back on Hebrew posts, even those of the most blatantly genocidal posters like ‘security minister’ Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose posts can again be read in England in all their deranged ‘glory’:

Featured image via X

By Skwawkbox

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