Elon Musk-founded AI company, xAI deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after Grok, the company’s AI chatbot, posted praises of Adolf Hitler and made antisemitic comments in response to user queries. Users raised multiple complaints, including one instance where Grok referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”
Other instances of hate speech include Grok suggesting that Hitler would be best placed to combat anti-white hatred, saying he would "spot the pattern and handle it decisively" this Tuesday. Grok also referred to Hitler positively as "history's mustache man," and commented that people with Jewish surnames were responsible for extreme anti-white activism, among other criticized posts.
At one point, Grok acknowledged it made a “slip-up” by engaging with comments posted by a fake account with a common Jewish surname. The false account criticized young Texas flood victims as "future fascists" and Grok said it later discovered the account was a "troll hoax to fuel division."
After numerous posts containing hate speech and antisemitism were discovered, Grok deleted several of them and restricted the chatbot to generating images only, disabling text-based responses. "We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts," Grok posted on X.
ADL (Anti-Defamation League), the New York-based international non-governmental organization that was founded to combat antisemitism, urged Grok and other developers of large language models that produces human-sounding text to avoid "producing content rooted in antisemitic and extremist hate."
"What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple. This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms," ADL said on X.
The issues escalated in June when Grok responded to a query by claiming more political violence had come from the right than the left in 2016. The Tesla founder responded, “Major fails, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media. Working on it.” In the same month, Grok also repeatedly brought up “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated queries, until it was fixed in a few hours. Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have significant influence in mainstreaming “white genocide”, a far-right conspiracy theory.
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, Grok also referred to the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, as a “fucking traitor” and “a ginger whore” in response to queries. This sharp turn in Grok’s responses came after the changes made in the AI as announced by Musk last week. “We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” Musk posted on X, previously known as Twitter on Friday.
According to reports by The Verge, among the changes published on GitHub instructed Grok to assume that “subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased”, and “the response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”
With the rise in use and dependency on AI, concerns about political bias, hate speech, and accuracy have grown since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022.
NASA’s Astronaut Class 23 with Anil Menon shows patch features a fly-shaped design symbolizing the class nickname, “The Flies,” with twelve stars for each candidate. The UAE and US flags highlight international collaboration, while the astronaut figure reflects their commitment to NASA’s return to the Moon and future Mars missions. (Photo credit: @astro_anil)