Grok

What is grok?

Some pieces crack during the drying process, and I fire these anyway. Things break. Sometimes I give up on a piece, dry it out and fire it anyway. All of this ends up as ‘kiln slag’, pottery which is an essential structural part of the kiln. Some potters smash this into coarse sand with a hammer and add it to clay as an aggregate, similar to combining sand and cement to make concrete. This is called ‘grok’. I don’t do this because it gives the clay a rough texture and I use glass rod polishing instead of a glaze. In any case, grok can be used anywhere you want little rocks which can take extreme heating, and it can be chipped and shaped for your purposes. Broken bisque doesn’t make sharp edges like porcelain or glass, because it is a composite rock the edges are less sharp than average broken rock.

Potters from th’ hills have been making and using grok for generations. On the internet, the term has some bizarre psycho-sexual definition credited to Robert Heinlein because pulp fiction is more searchable than traditional crafting. So Elon Musk chose this name for his new AI thing and, in Musk’s own words, ‘With AI we are summoning the demon.’ With broomstick, fuck the internet.