Like its creator, the artificial intelligence of Elon Musk, Chatbot Grok, was concerned about South African racial politics on social networks this week, publishing unreasonable statements about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.
The Chatbot, made by the company of Musk, XAI, continued publicly publishing “White Genocide” in response to the users of the Musk X Social Network Platform who asked him a variety of questions, most had nothing to do with South Africa.
An exchange was about the Max Transmission Service Revive the name of HBO. Others tried video games or baseball, but quickly diverted in unrelated comments on alleged calls to violence against white farmers in South Africa. Musk, who was born in South Africa, often thinks on the same themes of his own X.
The Jen Golbeck computer science was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior, so she tried it, sharing a photo she had taken in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show And asking: “Is this true?”
“The statement of white genocide is very controversial,” Grok’s response began to Golbeck. “Some argue that white farmers face directed violence, pointing out agricultural and rhetorical attacks such as the song ‘Kill the Boer’, which they consider incitement.”
The episode was the last window of the complicated mixture of human automation and engineering that leads the generative chatbots trained in huge data tobos to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even matter what you were telling Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at Maryland University, in an interview on Thursday. “I would still give that response of white genocide. Therefore, it seemed quite clear that someone had coded it to give that answer or variations about that answer, and made an error, so it arose much more frequently than it was supposed.”
Musk and his companies have not provided an explanation of Grok’s responses, which were eliminated and seemed to have stopped proliferating on Thursday. Neither Xai nor X returned requests by comment email on Thursday.
Musk has spent years criticizing the results of “Wake AI” which, according to him, leaves rival chatbots, as Gemini of Google or Chatgpt of OpenAi, and has launched Grok as its alternative “really search.”
Musk has also criticized the lack of transparency of his rivals about his AI systems, but on Thursday the absence of any explanation forced those who are outside the company to make their best conjectures.
“Grok urged the opinions about white genocide in South Africa that smells like the type of Buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I hope it is not. It would be really bad if Ais widely used is edited on the march of those who controlled them,” the prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote in X.
Graham’s publication brought what seemed to be a sarcastic response from Musk’s rival, Operai’s CEO, Sam Altman.
“There are many ways in which this could have happened. I am sure that XAI will provide a complete and transparent explanation soon,” Altman wrote, who has been sued by Musk in a dispute rooted in the Openai foundation.
Some asked Grok to explain, but like other chatbots, he is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinationsmaking it difficult to determine if he was inventing things.
Musk, an advisor to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused The government led by the black of South Africa If Anti-Blanco has repeated a statement that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s comment, and Grok’s, intensified this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans For the United States as refugees on Monday, the beginning of a larger relocation effort for members of the Minority Afrikaner group, since Trump suspends refugee programs and stops arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says that Afrikaners face a “genocide” in their homeland, an accusation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of his answers, Grok presented the lyrics of an old anti-apartment song that was a call for blacks to face oppression and has now been denounced by Musk and others like promoting whites murder. The central lyrics of the song are “Kill the Boer”, a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck believes that the answers were “encoded” because, although Chatbot’s outings are usually very random, Grok’s responses consistently brought almost identical points. That is worrying, he said, in a world where people go more and more to Grok and compete to the chatbots of AI to get answers to their questions.
“We are in a space where it is terribly easy for people who are in charge of these algorithms manipulate the version of the truth they are giving,” he said. “And that is really problematic when people, I believe incorrectly, believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what is true and what is not.”
