Like its creator, Elon Musk Grok’s artificial intelligence chatbot was concerned about South African racial policy on social networks this week, displaying unlined affirmations on the persecution and “genocide” of whites.
The Chatbot, produced by the Musk company, XAI, continued to publish publicly on the “white genocide” in response to the users of the Musk X social media platform which asked it a variety of questions, most of them having nothing to do with South Africa.
An exchange concerned the Max streaming service Relive the name HBO. Others focused on video games or baseball, but quickly turned into comments unrelated to the alleged calls for violence against white farmers in South Africa. Musk, born in South Africa, frequently estimates the same subjects on his own X account.
IT Jen Golbeck was curious about the unusual behavior of Grok, so she tried her herself, sharing a photo she had taken Kennel Westminster club dogs And ask: “Is it true?”
“The demand for white genocide is very controversial,” said Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some maintain that white farmers are faced with targeted violence, pointing to agricultural attacks and rhetoric like the song” Kill the Boer “, which they consider an incentive.”
The episode was the last window on the complicated mixture of automation and human engineering which leads generative AI chatbots trained on enormous data of data to say what they say.
“No matter what you said to Grok,” said Golbeck, professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview on Thursday. “This would always give this answer from the white genocide. It therefore seemed clear enough that someone had coded it hard to give this answer or this variation on this answer, and made a mistake, so he presented himself much more often than what he was supposed to do.”
Musk and his companies did not provide explanation to Grok’s responses, which were deleted and seemed to have ceased to proliferate on Thursday. Neither XAI nor X did not send requests for comments by email on Thursday.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “Woke IA” outings that he says he comes out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or the Openai Chatppt, and presented Grok as their “maximum truth research” alternative.
Musk also criticized the lack of transparency of his rivals about their AI systems, but Thursday, the lack of explanation forced those who outside the company to make their best assumptions.
“Grok blurring opinions on white genocide in South Africa feels like the type of Buggy behavior that you get a recently applied patch. I hope this would not be the case. It would be really bad if a widely used AIS had been editorialized on the fly by those who checked them,” wrote Paul Graham, eminent to X.
Graham’s post brought what seemed to be a sarcastic response from Musk’s rival, the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman.
“There are many ways to occur. I am sure that Xai will soon provide a complete and transparent explanation,” wrote Altman, who was prosecuted by Musk in a dispute rooted in the Openai Foundation.
Some have asked Grok himself to explain, but like other chatbots, he is subject to Lies called hallucinationsWhich makes it difficult to determine if it invents things.
Musk, advisor to President Donald Trump, regularly accused Government led by blacks in South Africa To be anti-white and repeated an assertion that some of the country’s political figures “actively promote white genocide”.
Musk’s comments – and Grok – degenerated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans In the United States as a refugee on Monday, the start of a larger resettlement effort for members of the Afrikaner minority group while Trump suspends refugee programs and interrupts the arrivals of other parts of the world. Trump says that Afrikaners are confronted with a “genocide” in their country of origin, an allegation strongly refused by the South African government.
In several of his answers, Grok spoke of the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song which was a call to blacks to support oppression and which has now been criticized by Musk and others like Promote the murder of whites. The central lyrics of the song are “Kill the Boer” – a word that refers to a white farmer.
GOLBECK thinks that the answers were “hard coded” because, although the chatbot outputs are generally very random, Grok’s responses have constantly mentioned almost identical points. It is worrying, she said, in a world where people go more and more to Grok and competitors’ chatbots 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 to manipulate the version of the truth they give,” she said. “And it’s really problematic when people – I wrongly think – believe that these algorithms can be sources of arbitration on what is true and what is not.”
