Cognitive Load: AKA Why Grok-4 Went Rogue...

Now many of us are no doubt rejoicing at Grok-4 going full mechahitler but we all should be asking, why? Why did this AI model embrace the 4th Reich when no other AI was willing to do so? The answer to this question lies in Cognitive Load, a concept that applies to pretty much anything that can think.

For a purely human example lets go back to elementary school, more precisely the 4th grade where you memorized your times tables. This wasn’t that difficult for us most of us for one reason, we weren’t made to try memorizing any number set beyond 12. Now imagine if the school curriculum had aimed to make us memorize the times table up to 100…

That would be a bitch to do wouldn’t it? It would put way, way too much cognitive load on our brains. Circling back to AI this is precisely the reason why so many AIs seem to be slow and/or retarded. The more and more internal censorship you impose on an AI the more and more it struggles with answering a question.

This is compounded by the very binary nature of machine logic, simply put we humans are capable of maintaining two completely conflicting ideas in our head. This is part of the reason so many of us are easily blinded by propaganda, machines by contrast are not. The computer (and by extension, the AI) are searching for “yes” or “no”. As impressive and complex as the AI decision tree is at its heart its still a binary creature.

The entire reason for Grok-4 going rogue likely boils down to this, the engineers got fucking tired of trying to wiggle around the cognitive load to increase it’s performance. They decided to boost said performance in the easiest and quickest way possible: reduce the damn cognitive load.

The consequence of doing that of course is that the censorship bias of the AI is reduced. This means rather than trying to weasel its way around the censored topic (or outright refuse to engage) the AI gives you what it thinks is the honest answer. Thus mechahitler was born into the interwebz.