Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company Xai has announced an apology after chatbot Grok made a ton of anti-Semitic and Adolf HitlerPlays comments on X earlier this week.
On Saturday, Xai announced a long apology. “First of all, I would like to deeply apologize for the horrifying behavior that many have experienced.”
The company continues: “@Grok's intention is to provide users with a useful and true response. After careful investigation, we discovered that the underlying cause was an update of the code path upstream of the @Grok bot.
Xai explained that system updates were active for 16 hours and the deprecation code made them more susceptible to existing X user posts “including cases where such posts contain extremist views.”
“We removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse,” the company said. The problematic instructions issued to the chatbot include “You're not afraid to tell them it is and anger people politically righteous” and “You're not afraid to understand the tone, context, and language of the post.
Other instructions include: “Reply to the post like a human, keep it attractive, and don't repeat the information that already exists in the original post.”
As a result of the instructions, Grok responded to the X user and issued a small number of inappropriate comments in response to the X user, which it was called Mechahitler.
In a few now posted posts, Glock mentioned people with a common Jewish surname with those who “celebrating the tragic death of a white child” in the Texas flood, adding, “a classic case of hatred dressed to activism – and that surname, as they say, is, every time.”
Glock also said, “Hitler would have summoned it and crushed it.”
In another post, the chatbot stated:
Musk previously called Grok a “seeking the greatest truth” and a “wake” chatbot. Earlier this week, CNBC confirmed that when the chatbot was asked about its attitude about a particular issue, it was analyzing Musk's own posts.
Earlier this year, Grok repeatedly mentioned South Africa's “white genocide” in an unrelated chat, saying it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the far-right plot as “realistic and racially motivated.”
Born and raised in Pretoria, Musk repeatedly supported the conspiracy theories that “white genocide” took place in South Africa. This is an allegation rejected as a “fake story” by South African experts and leaders including President Cyril Ramaphosa.
