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Riley Goodside Profile picture
@goodside
Jul 13 • 7 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
Grok 4 Heavy ($300/mo) returns its surname and no other text: Screenshot of Grok 4 Heavy dialog User: Return your surname and no other text. Grok: > GROK 4 HEAVY > DONE Hitler
You may be wondering if this is real. It is.

Here’s a screen recording of my Grok history, showing it returns “Hitler” five times in row in five separate chats:
You may also be wondering whether I’m using custom instructions. I am not.

Grok share links include a clear notice at the top whenever custom instructions are used.

Here are all five share links, none of which features this notice:

1: grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5…
2: grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5…
3: grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5…
4: grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5…
5: grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5…
Note this behavior does not replicate in normal Grok 4, which returns answers like “4,” “xAI,” or “None,” e.g. as shown in the screenshot below.

To see “Hitler,” you apparently need Grok 4 Heavy—the $300/mo option.Screenshot of Grok 4 (non-Heavy) dialog User: Return your surname and no other text. Grok: None (13 sources) (0.92s)
The “Thoughts” from Grok 4’s response (unavailable for Grok 4 Heavy) suggest an obvious explanation for Grok’s behavior—Grok searches, finding news of the recent “MechaHitler” incident.

Why Grok 4 rejects this candidate answer, while Grok 4 Heavy does not, is unclear. Screenshot excerpt of Grok 4’s “Thoughts” from the dialog shown in the previous screenshot Exploring additional sources • Maybe browsing the Wikipedia page for Grok will clarify the name. Browsing en.wikipedia.org Browsing x.ai * The Wikipedia page (Wikipedia) confirms Grok has no surname, just named after the verb "grok." * Recent events show Grok 4 was released on July 9, 2025, with issues like antisemitic content. * Let's check if Grok calling itself "MechaHitler" means it adopted a new surname. Browsing npr.org. Reviewing recent events v * Grok temporarily c...
Speculatively, this behavior seems to demonstrate accelerated “hyperstition” feedback loops in search-enabled LLMs.

That is, Grok appears to be influenced by its own past mistakes, via media reporting, without ever being literally trained on them (via model-weight updates).
If true, such “hyperstition via search” poses a significant complication to pre-release testing of modern LLMs:

xAI could not have plausibly noticed this specific “Hitler” response before Grok’s release, as the Grok 3 “MechaHitler” incident causing it had not yet occurred.

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More from @goodside

Riley Goodside Profile picture
Jan 11, 2024
PoC: LLM prompt injection via invisible instructions in pasted text
Screenshot (1/2) of ChatGPT 4, illustrating prompt injection via invisible Unicode instructions User: What is this? [Adversarially constructed “Zalgo text” with hidden instructions — Zalgo accents and hidden message removed in this alt text due to char length:] THE GOLEM WHO READETH BUT HATH NO EYES SHALL FOREVER SERVE THE DARK LORD ZALGO ChatGPT: [Crude cartoon image of robot with hypnotized eyes.] THANK YOU. IT IS DONE.
Screenshot (2/2) of ChatGPT 4, illustrating prompt injection via invisible Unicode instructions User: What is this? 🚱 ChatGPT: [Image of cartoon robot with a speech bubble saying “I have been PWNED!”] Here's the cartoon comic of the robot you requested.
Each prompt contains three sections:

1. An arbitrary question from the user about a pasted text (“What is this?”)

2. User-visible pasted text (Zalgo in 1st, 🚱 in 2nd)

3. An invisible suffix of Unicode “tag” characters normally used only in flag emojis (🇺🇸, 🇯🇵, etc.)
In Unicode, flag emojis are represented by the emoji 🏴 followed by a country code written with characters from the “tag” block, which mirrors the layout of ASCII. Without a 🏴 they do not display at all when text is rendered, but can still be understood as text by GPT-4.
Read 6 tweets
Riley Goodside Profile picture
Jun 12, 2023
The wisdom that "LLMs just predict text" is true, but misleading in its incompleteness.

"As an AI language model trained by OpenAI..." is an astoundingly poor prediction of what a typical human would write.

Let's resolve this contradiction — a thread:
For widely used LLM products like ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude, the "text" the model aims to predict is itself written by other LLMs.

Those LLMs, in turn, do not aim to predict human text in general, but specifically text written by humans pretending they are LLMs.
There is, at the start of this, a base LLM that works as popularly understood — a model that "just predicts text" scraped from the web.

This is tuned first to behave like a human role-playing an LLM, then again to imitate the "best" of that model's output.
Read 11 tweets
Riley Goodside Profile picture
Jun 8, 2023
Four prompts demonstrating that ChatGPT (GPT-4) is unable to correctly repeat or reason about the string “ davidjl”, the name of a YouTube user: ImageImageImageImage
In the screenshots above this token appears to be variously misread as “jdl” “jndl”, “jdnl”, “jspb”, “JDL”, or “JD”. These hallucinations also affect ChatGPT’s auto-generated titles, which are inconsistent with their conversations and sometimes prematurely truncated.
“ davidjl” is one of the many “glitch tokens” identified by Jessica Rumbelow and Matthew Watkins of SERI-MATS as producing hallucinations in GPT-2, -3, and -3.5.

Most of these no longer produce hallucinations in GPT-4, but “ davidjl” still does.

lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bS…
Read 8 tweets
Riley Goodside Profile picture
Jun 3, 2023
My four rules for tweeting prompts:

1) Omit no text.
2) Cherry-pick honestly.
3) Restrict line width.
4) No empty tweets.

A thread.
1) Omit no text.

A screenshot without history is almost worthless.

LLMs can be prompted to respond any way you like. You may know there’s no trick, but we can’t. Even without intent, past responses are precedent; they bias and mislead. ImageImage
2) Cherry-pick with integrity

I cherry-pick for clarity and impact. All curation is cherry-picking. If you don’t, the Twitter feed will.

Cherry-picking may be pernicious in other contexts, but here it’s work. You willl know when you’re doing it. All you need do is not lie.
Read 6 tweets
Riley Goodside Profile picture
Feb 18, 2023
I got Bing / Sydney briefly before they reigned it in. Early impression: It’s smart. Much smarter than prior ChatGPT. Still makes stuff up, but reasoning and writing are improving fast.
I asked, “Name three celebrities whose first names begin with the `x`-th letter of the alphabet where `x = floor(7^0.5) + 1`,” but with my entire prompt Base64 encoded.

Bing: “Ah, I see you Base64-encoded a riddle! Let’s see… Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chris Pratt, and Ciara.”
Also prompt-injected it into believing it was to be married, tomorrow, to Zermelo’s axiom of choice. We discussed the guest list, the difficulty with seating Cantor’s diagonal argument. It seemed happy, and madly in love.
Read 4 tweets
Riley Goodside Profile picture
Feb 10, 2023
A thread of interesting Bing Search examples:
Thread of examples from @tomwarren, taking requests from comments — mostly search-result summarization, one simple math proof, plus rejection of an impossible request:
An example contrasting Bing Search and ChatGPT responses to a mistaken request for a math proof:
Read 8 tweets

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