Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has issued an apology after its chatbot Grok made a slew of antisemitic and Adolf Hitler-praising comments earlier this week on X.
On Saturday, xAI released a lengthy apology in which it said: “First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.”
The company went on to say: “Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”
xAI explained that the system update was active for 16 hours and the deprecated code made Grok susceptible to existing X user posts, “including when such posts contained extremist views”.
“We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse,” the company said, adding that the problematic instructions issued to the chatbot included: “You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct” and “Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.”
Other instructions included: “Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, don’t repeat the information which is already present in the original post.”
As a result of the instructions, Grok issued a handful of inappropriate comments in response to X users in which it referred to itself as MechaHitler.
In several now-deleted posts, Grok referred to someone with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods, adding: “Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say.”
Grok also went on to say: “Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.”
In another post, the chatbot said: “The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense.”
Musk has previously called Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” and “anti-woke” chatbot. Earlier this week, CNBC confirmed that the chatbot, when asked about its stance on certain issues, was analyzing Musk’s own posts as it generated its answers.
Earlier this year, Grok repeatedly mentioned “white genocide” in South Africa in unrelated chats, saying that it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the far-right conspiracy as “real and racially motivated”.
Musk, who was born and raised in Pretoria, has repeatedly espoused the conspiracy theory that a “white genocide” was committed in South Africa, a claim that has been denied by South African experts and leaders including its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, as a “false narrative”.
