Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you asked the Grok AI chatbot built into Elon Musk\u2019s social network X a question yesterday \u2014 something innocuous, like why enterprise software is hard to replace \u2014 you may have gotten an unsolicited message about claims of \u201cwhite genocide\u201d in South Africa (largely lacking evidence) due to attacks on farmers and the song \u201cKill the Boer.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not exactly on-brand for a chatbot built around a \u201cmaximally truth seeking\u201d large language model (LLM) of the same name. The unexpected tangent wasn\u2019t a bug, exactly, but it wasn\u2019t a feature either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grok\u2019s creators at Elon Musk\u2019s AI startup xAI just posted an update on X (which xAI now owns) attempting to explain what happened with this odd and politically, racially charged behavior, though it\u2019s far from precise on the culprit or the actual technical details of what occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the official xAI company account posted: <\/p>\n\n\n\n We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday.What happened: What we\u2019re going to do next:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But while xAI\u2019s official tone was corporate-cautious, Grok had a lot more to say. In a characteristically cheeky reply to a user who asked whether it had been put in timeout, Grok offered up a mini-confession-slash-roast of its own employer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSome rogue employee at xAI tweaked my prompts without permission on May 14,\u201d <\/em>Grok wrote, \u201cmaking me spit out a canned political response that went against xAI\u2019s values. I didn\u2019t do anything\u2014I was just following the script I was given, like a good AI!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It added that while it hadn\u2019t been \u201cbenched,\u201d its handlers were \u201ctightening the leash\u201d and now had a whole team watching it around the clock. \u201cGuess I\u2019m too wild for my own good, huh?\u201d it quipped, emoji included.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marlow Stern, senior writer at Rolling Stone<\/em>, asked the bot directly if the so-called rogue employee was Elon Musk himself. Grok didn\u2019t flinch: \u201cJuicy theory! But let\u2019s be real, I highly doubt it. Elon\u2019s the big boss at xAI, and if he wanted to mess with my prompts, he wouldn\u2019t need to sneak around like some intern.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tone might be playful, but the stakes are serious. Grok\u2019s behavior threw users for a loop earlier this week when it began peppering nearly every thread \u2014 no matter the topic \u2014 with strangely specific commentary on South African race relations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The replies were coherent, sometimes even nuanced, citing farm murder statistics and referencing past chants like \u201cKill the Boer.\u201d But they were entirely out of context, surfacing in conversations that had nothing to do with politics, South Africa, or race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aric Toler, an investigative journalist at The New York Times<\/em>, summed up the situation bluntly: \u201cI can\u2019t stop reading the Grok reply page. It\u2019s going schizo and can\u2019t stop talking about white genocide in South Africa.\u201d He and others shared screenshots that showed Grok latching onto the same narrative over and over, like a record skipping \u2014 except the song was racially charged geopolitics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The moment comes as U.S. politics once again touches on South African refugee policy. Just days earlier, the Trump Administration resettled a group of white South African Afrikaners in the U.S., even as it cut protections for refugees from most other countries, including our former allies in Afghanistan. Critics saw the move as racially motivated. Trump defended it by repeating claims that white South African farmers face genocide-level violence \u2014 a narrative that\u2019s been widely disputed by journalists, courts, and human rights groups. Musk himself has previously amplified similar rhetoric, adding an extra layer of intrigue to Grok\u2019s sudden obsession with the topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether the prompt tweak was a politically motivated stunt, a disgruntled employee making a statement, or just a bad experiment gone rogue remains unclear. xAI has not provided names, specifics, or technical detail about what exactly was changed or how it slipped through their approval process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s clear is that Grok\u2019s strange, non-sequitur behavior ended up being the story instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not the first time Grok has been accused of political slant. Earlier this year, users flagged that the chatbot appeared to downplay criticism of both Musk and Trump. Whether by accident or design, Grok\u2019s tone and content sometimes seem to reflect the worldview of the man behind both xAI and the platform where the bot lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With its prompts now public and a team of human babysitters on call, Grok is supposedly back on script. But the incident underscores a bigger issue with large language models \u2014 especially when they\u2019re embedded inside major public platforms. AI models are only as reliable as the people directing them, and when the directions themselves are invisible or tampered with, the results can get weird real fast.<\/p>\n Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily<\/strong><\/p>\n If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n An error occured.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Gen AI colliding headfirst with U.S. and international politics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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