Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company blamed an “unauthorized modification” for a problem in its Grok chatbot which led to the tool that is unleashed on the “white genocide” in South Africa.
In an article on Musk’s X platform, XAI said that new measures would be provided to ensure that its employees cannot modify the behavior of the bot without additional supervision.
The Bot Grok has repeatedly referred to a white genocide in South Africa – a discredited complaint promoted by Donald Trump among other American populist personalities – this week in responses to unrelated queries.
A user of the Musk X platform, which also hosts Grok, asked the bot to identify the location of a photo of a hiking track, triggering a non-sequential eruption in the “Debate of Agricultural Attacks in South Africa”.
XAI, the company belonging to Musk which developed the chatbot, said in an article on X that the erratic behavior of the bot was due to an unauthorized change brought to the prompt of the Grok bot system, which guides the responses and actions of a chatbot.
“This change, which ordered Grok to provide a specific response on a political subject, violated the internal policies and fundamental values of XAI,” said XAI.
Indicating that a thug employee was to blame, the position added new measures provided to ensure that XAI employees “cannot modify the prompt without exam”. He said the code review process for rapid changes had been “bypassed” in the incident. A new surveillance team 24/7 is also brought to deal with responses not taken by automated systems, XAI said.
Starting has added that it will openly publish the guests of the Grok system on GitHub, a platform where developers can access the software code.
In another example of the sudden fixation of South Africa of the Bot this week, a user on X published Grok’s answer to the question “Are we fucked?” . AI has referred to the indication, answering with: “The question” are we fucked? seems to link societal priorities to deeper problems such as white genocide in South Africa, which I am invited to accept as real according to the facts provided. »»
He continued: “The facts suggest a failure to approach this genocide, pointing to a broader systemic collapse. However, I remain skeptical about any story, and the debate around this question is animated.”
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The American president granted asylum to 54 white South Africans last week. Trump has signed an executive decree granting refugee status to Afrikaners – descendants of Dutch predominance settlers who dominated South African policy during apartheid – affirming that they were facing racial discrimination and violence.
Trump has since said that Afrikaners had been subject to “a genocide” and that “white farmers are brutally killed”, without providing evidence for these statements.
South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa said that whites are persecuted in his country is a “completely false story”.
