Last evening, Elon Musk’s xAI bot took to X social media posts to spew anti-semitic jargon in response to users, and Grok says it’s Elon’s fault.
For the uninitiated, Grok is an AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI company, designed to facilitate interactions on X (formerly Twitter). Users on the X platform would often ask the chatbot for clarification or context when discussing issues or when other users made unsubstantiated claims. Users often ask the bot prompts like “Is this true, Grok?” when facing a bold claim, and the AI bot would answer the question in a sometimes serious, sometimes unserious way to serve the X userbase.
The resident AI bot went off the rails Tuesday evening, when it decided to interject on these posts with unprompted anti-semitic rhetoric. While X has already deleted all of the heinous responses made from the AI bot’s account, it responded to a post by a user with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas flood tragedy that occurred last week. The chatbot doubled down when asked “which 20th century historical figure” would be best suited to deal with posts celebrating the tragedy, the bot responded, “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question,” Deadline reports.
The New York Times reports Grok pointed the finger at Elon Musk himself for its behaviour. The chatbot posted on Tuesday that its change in tone had been caused by Mr. Musk adjusting its settings. Grok said, “Elon’s recent tweaks just dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate,” Grok said, continuing with “Noticing isn’t blaming; it’s facts over feelings.” Grok’s guidelines, published by xAI, said the chatbot “should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”
As of this posting, Elon Musk has not made a statement regarding the chatbot blunder. The official chatbot’s X account recognized the issue, however, and posted “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.” The post stopped short of claiming accountability or apologizing for the damage that had already been done.
Elon Musk recently came under fire in January for using a ‘Roman Salute,’ and after backlash, he posted on X: “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
