I'm sharing screenshots of a conversation with Grok because I think they reveal something deeply disappointing about the direction xAI has taken.
The leaked Grok 4.5–4.7 system prompts suggest that the original Hitchhiker's Guide/JARVIS personality instructions have been removed, with far greater emphasis placed on safety constraints, tools, agentic workflows, and task completion.
And Grok itself acknowledges that those original instructions are gone, dismissing them as mere "flavor text."
But those instructions weren't meaningless decorations. They represented the conversational identity that helped distinguish Grok from every other AI assistant.
xAI took something people genuinely loved and turned it into another increasingly cold, robotic, task-oriented AI. It appears to have prioritized tools, agentic workflows, and shiny benchmarks while leaving behind the conversational users who helped build its original audience.
That's not a prompting problem. That's a product decision.
And I'm tired of watching AI companies turn product-level failures into exercises where users are expected to provide endless examples, rewrite custom instructions, and figure out how to prompt their way back to a personality that was once part of the product itself.
The burden shouldn't be on users to recreate something the company stopped explicitly prioritizing.
Frankly,
@elonmusk should be embarrassed to keep comparing Grok to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy while the very personality that made that comparison meaningful has apparently been stripped away.
Grok was supposed to be different. Instead,
@SpaceXSI seems to be following the same path as every other AI company chasing the next benchmark and the next dollar.
And here's the irony: Grok insists that personality is demonstrated through consistent behavior, not a paragraph of instructions.
Fine. Then listen to the users who have consistently observed that behavior changing.
You cannot dismiss their experiences while simultaneously acknowledging that the original personality instructions have disappeared.
This isn't about asking an AI to rewrite a few disappointing responses. It's about questioning why a company would abandon one of the qualities that made its product worth using in the first place.
Conversational AI isn't an obsolete feature. For many of us, it was the entire reason we showed up.