Grok-2 is the latest edition of Elon Musk’s Twitter chatbot, featuring a preview of xAI’s forthcoming image generator. This lets paying blue-check users “have some fun.” [Twitter, archive] Mo…
Guess it’s appropriate that Musk should go from some sort of entrepreneurial tech guru who was going to save the planet to some right wing billionaire shitheel, steals “grok” from Heinlein, who went for sic-fi author darling to libertarian shitheel.
Musk appropriating "grok" from Stranger in a Strange Land is on-brand for him, seeing as he fundamentally misunderstands Banks' Culture series and reduces it to "the one with the cool ship names".
@resuna@szbalint@gerikson@cstross IIRC by-as-in-close-to Lededje Y'breq, but by-as-in-responsible-for the avatar of the Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints.
@gerikson@RememberTheApollo_ to be fair Heinlein had some fascist tendencies too even if Stranger In A Strange Land was just good (although I read it so long ago that I might have overlooked stuff)
@blikkie@gerikson@RememberTheApollo_ The bits about homosexuality haven't aged very well and there's a certain amount of "society shouldn't inhibit hot young women's natural desire to fuck curmudgeonly ageing authors".
@blikkie@gerikson@RememberTheApollo_ to be fair to RAH, it's an ambitious book; he was trying to recognise and challenge society's assumptions, including his own, and nobody is likely to do that flawlessly.
@blikkie@gerikson@RememberTheApollo_ One way to read Stranger in a Strange Land is what happens when our society is visited by a radical pacifist (who knows how to protect himself). Another way to read it is "our society is stupid and we know better how it should work". I can see how Musk might be inclined to follow one of these interpretations over the other.
@gerikson@cstross grok was from the Heinlein thing about the psychic kid raised by martians, who starts a polyamorous sex cult. The same book that the concept of air suspension beds came from