- Tuesday, May 20, 2025
The chatbot ignited controversy by answering multiple user prompts with right-wing propaganda about the purported oppression of white South Africans
By: India Weekly
MICROSOFT has said its cloud servers will now host Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI, days after its chatbot generated misleading and unsolicited posts referencing “white genocide” in South Africa.
The chatbot ignited controversy by answering multiple user prompts with right-wing propaganda about the purported oppression of white South Africans.
The Tesla tycoon told an event hosted by Microsoft that his company’s models “aspire to truth with minimal error,” but conceded that mistakes do happen.
In a recorded conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk said that xAI would always acknowledge mistakes with its Grok AI models.
“It’s incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality,” Musk said.
Generative AI models are often pre-programmed by engineers – through system prompts – to give or avoid specific responses or convey certain moods or styles, no matter the input given by the user.
The answers provided by Grok drew alarm as they reflected a conspiracy theory often shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa.
The company did not identify who made the code change, but said an “unauthorized modification” directed Grok to provide a specific response that “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.”
Faced with criticism, the startup said it was implementing measures to make Grok’s system prompts public, change its review processes and put in place a “24/7 monitoring team” to address future incidents.
While not specifically referring to the incident, Musk told the Microsoft event that xAI will practice transparency when mistakes are made.
Many see this as a dig at archrival OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which is Microsoft’s main partner to build its in-house Copilot models.
OpenAI, which was co-founded by Musk in 2015, is often criticized for keeping its technology’s internal workings secret, as opposed to more open models like Meta’s Llama or the technology from Chinese company DeepSeek.
The Grok models from xAI will be available on Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, a platform that makes hundreds of models available for paying developers to build their own generative AI models.
The platform gives users access to popular models from various creators such as OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta, Stability AI, and now xAI.
AI tools for writing software code are rapidly evolving into “agents” that can assist developers, according to the Microsoft chief.
Some 15 million developers have used Github CoPilot AI to code or troubleshoot at the Microsoft-owned platform, the company said.
Microsoft last week said it was slashing unnecessary layers of management and seizing the benefits of new technology as reports said the tech behemoth was laying off thousands of workers.
The tech giant did not disclose the total number of lost jobs, but US media reports said it will amount to about 6,000 people or about three percent of its global workforce.
