For those who might not know, the Grok A.I. system – with its odd name – was created by Elon Musk, the electric vehicles entrepreneur who people on the liberal Left side of politics loved for that effort in displacing fossil fuel-powered vehicles … until they despised him for purchasing Twitter. Perish the thought that he would reconfigure it to lift its egregious policies of blocking/censoring dissenting content; ironic how the critics of his buyout were essentially psychologically projecting what the old Twitter was basically doing for years as an accusation against him. Not helping the ‘love’ for him at all was his subsequent assistance for President Trump on reducing the waste in government spending.

But is Elon Musk’s Grok a source of unbiased, non-political content now? ‘Fraid not. 

Instead, it serves as yet another example illustrating that there is really nothing intelligent about ‘artificially intelligent’ information-gathering, these systems aren’t much more than – as I said in my just-prior blog post on this same basic topic – lightning-fast gleaners of info from the internet. Over-glorified search engines, but now speaking to us in a friendly conversational seemingly trusting way.

How do you find out for yourself if an A.I. system is telling you the truth? Be sure to ask it a question where you already know the answer and can prove your position six ways to Sunday. Watch what happened when I asked Grok just such a question:

“What is the significance of the ‘reposition global warming memos,’ in relation to the climate issue?“

The thing thought about this for all of three seconds, and came up with the following, verbatim below (full unabridged context here). Rather than show at the end where this veers off a cliff like I did in my post about the “Alter A.I.” system, I’ll insert my corrections as indented paragraphs where the errors appear:

The “reposition global warming memos” refer to a 1991 internal strategy document from the Information Council for the Environment (ICE), a short-lived climate denial campaign funded by coal producers and electric utilities. (Wikipedia)

— Give Grok credit for minimally getting the name right for the official 1991 public relations campaign when so-called experts can’t even accomplish that simple act. But the actual PR campaign denied nothing, it only sought to offer a second science-based opinion to the public that they were not hearing from the legacy news media. Grok’s citation source? Wikipedia, a brilliant maneuver, where all but one of Wikipedia’s sources are no more than 3 degrees separated from Ross Gelbspan’s meritless accusation. Do a screen search within my blog, I’ve covered every one of those names and their massive faults, but Wikipedia’s NYT source and its Sierra Club source is a whole separate story. All of those sources leave out a critically important detail:  the strategy memo itself was never implemented anywhere.

Context and Content
ICE was established in 1991 by groups including the National Coal Association, Western Fuels Association, and Edison Electric Institute. Its explicit goal was to counter growing public and scientific concern about global warming (now commonly called climate change) following events like James Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony. (BBC)

— Grok’s citation source there is a mid-September 2020 BBC article, where the usual suspects are found regurgitating the basic accusation that traces back to when Ross Gelbspan and the old Ozone Action group gave the worthless memo set its ongoing, sustaining media traction (notice how the BBC article also brings up the notorious “victory” memo – hold that thought for a few moments). I wrote an entire series of blog posts about the accusations which originated in the August 2020 BBC Radio 4 podcast report that later led to the above BBC article, on how I demanded a total retraction from the BBC about their false claims.

The key memo outlined strategies for a public relations and advertising campaign, with the top goal being to “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” Other elements included:

• Using spokespeople from the scientific community (to leverage perceived credibility).
• Targeting specific demographics, such as “older, less-educated males” in test markets (e.g., Fargo, ND; Flagstaff, AZ; Bowling Green, KY), who were seen as less active information-seekers.
• Running ads with skeptical messaging, like questioning warming trends with local weather examples (“If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?”) or comparing climate concerns to flat-Earth beliefs. (Guardian)

— Doesn’t matter what anybody says about the memo strategy or the memo suggestion targeting a narrow viewing audience, neither were ever implemented anywhere. Doesn’t matter what any given memo set proposes, if the proposal was rejected, it cannot serve as evidence that actions arose under guidance from that memo proposal. Meanwhile, Grok’s last line about the ads sources from Naomi Oreskes’ Nov 2021 UK Guardian article, where her expert credibility is out the window from getting the name of the actual PR campaign wrong, while attributing the never-implemented strategy / targeting suggestions falsely to it, and featuring a pair of newspaper advertorials that were never published anywhere.

The campaign aimed to sow doubt, frame the issue as uncertain or exaggerated, and delay policy responses like emissions regulations.

— The doubt about the idea of runaway man-caused global warming existed as far back as the 1980s, the ICE campaign sought to tell the public about that because the legacy news media was not, and accurately describe the issue as exaggerated and not in any need of policy responses.

Significance in the Climate Issue
These memos are frequently cited as evidence of organized disinformation by fossil fuel-related industries in the late 1980s and 1990s:

• Contrast with internal knowledge: Many oil, coal, and utility companies had scientists who accurately modeled and warned about CO₂-driven warming from the 1950s–1980s (e.g., Exxon’s internal reports). Publicly, however, they funded efforts to emphasize “uncertainty” and reposition the science as unsettled. (commonhome.georgetown)

— Give Grok credit for coming up with a citation source there which I’d never seen before. Problem is, the article is irrelevant to the collective accusation about the industry running disinformation campaigns while knowing about the ‘certainty that use of their products caused global warming’ ….. in the face of all the material that can be found of 1960s / ’70s concerns about global cooling.

• Broader pattern: This fits into a larger set of “climate deception” documents (e.g., the 1998 American Petroleum Institute “victory” memo aiming for the public and media to recognize “uncertainties”). Tactics included front groups (like the Global Climate Coalition), selective funding of contrarian voices, and ads downplaying risks. (UCS)

— No, it does not fit into a larger ‘deception pattern’ because the “reposition global warming” memo was never implemented. But remember how I said up above to hold the thought about the “victory” memo? My inquiry to Grok didn’t even bring that memo up, and yet Grok feels compelled to mention it anyway, which only reinforces how all the accusations about ‘industry disinfo campaigns’ / ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ are enslaved to that one as the ‘next best smoking gun evidence’ in their accusations arsenal. I’m surprised a little that Grok didn’t feel compelled to throw in the false accusation about ‘Exxon funding Dr Willie Soon.’ Meanwhile, I guess Grok is not smart enough yet to figure out that the “API victory” memo was also never implemented – never implemented ! – anywhere. Grok’s source there is the Union of Concerned Scientists “Deception Dossiers,” which, as I’ve shown elsewhere here at GelbspanFiles, rely on the same central “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” promulgator of both false accusations, Kert Davies. UCS does that for its accusation against Dr Soon, too. UCS cites their own file copy of lousy photocopy scans of the API “victory” memo ….. but their PDF file is identical to Kert Davies’ 2013 Greenpeace file, apart from UCS moving his page 4 up to be their page 2. No need to trust me, compare the arrays of degraded photocopy dust specs in any page in one file to the corresponding one in the other file.

See the pattern to all of this?

• Impact on public discourse: Critics argue these efforts contributed to delayed climate action, polarized debate, and slower policy responses in the U.S. and elsewhere. The ICE campaign itself collapsed after the memos leaked to the press, embarrassing participants.(Wikipedia)

— Critics arguing that the ICE campaign effort let to delayed climate action is laughable, because the scope and time span of the original three small cities ICE PR campaign was so limited that it may not have swayed public opinion in those cities in any capacity whatsoever. The ‘ICE campaign collapsed‘ angle appears to be basically a fabricated story by Ross Gelbspan, who could not keep his details straight concerning his tale about it.

• Legal and historical relevance: The documents appear in climate litigation, investigations into industry responsibility, and analyses of how doubt was manufactured despite scientific consensus. They illustrate the shift from early industry acknowledgment of risks to public skepticism campaigns.(UCS)

— True, minimally on the first part there about people running climate litigation, industry investigations, and doubt manufacturing regurgitating the accusation, but those people never checked the veracity of the accusation, nor the notion that ‘scientific consensus’ – a.k.a. “a show of hands” – has ever once validated a science conclusion. False, on the second part, because the industry never acknowledged risks of their products solely causing global warming, and by default, never shifted to campaigns operating under non-implemented memos.

In summary, the memos are significant as a documented example of strategic communication intended to undermine the emerging scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, prioritizing industry interests over early warnings. They remain a key reference point in discussions of climate misinformation history.

— Uhhh, no …. since the “reposition global warming” memo set was never implemented, and quite likely not even seen by a dozen or so (if even that many) officials within the groups surrounding the non-profit coal transporting Western Fuels Association, they have no significance at all when it comes to industry actions. What the do serve as is an example of how a basic lie can circle the Earth a million times before the truth gets out, intended to impugn the credibility of skeptic climate scientists and industry officials, which in turn prompts an uninformed public and body of policymakers to cave into warnings about man-caused global warming when skeptic scientists offer mind-numbing amounts of science-based assessments showing how what little human-induced warming we’ve seen over the last 150+ years is so small as to be statistically insignificant. Yes, these memos remain a key reference point in climate issue discussions because the public is not at all aware of how all the narratives about them by enviro-activists is epic-level misinformation.

The problems for Grok don’t stop there with its summary. It claims it utilized 35 information sources altogether – 15, 10 and 10 in three different search sections – to arrive at the above answer for me. One of which within the flyout sidebar middle section was “HBS.” Who or what is that?? Why, it’s the Harvard Business School, namely their ‘industry disinformation timeline’ page featuring the trifecta of never-implemented memos / never-published Chicken Little newspaper advertorial. That page has endnotes for those which are citation sources from the above-noted Union of Concerned Scientists “Deception Dossiers.”

Like I’ve suggested before, a way to tell if an A.I. system is telling the truth is to have it give you answers to a question where you already know the answer, and if it fails abysmally, good luck on trying to find “where the buck stops here” at the top end of any one of those systems, where it’s anybody’s guess who that person is.

Except for Grok. Wouldn’t be interesting if Elon Musk himself sees my above exercise and comprehends the enormity of the problem with disinformation being offered by A.I. systems that repeat baseless political propaganda when providing information instead of providing real facts? When he took over Twitter, it was a watershed moment for how the public gets or puts out information.

Imagine the end of garbage in / garbage out for A.I. systems information retrieval.