The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts. xAI recently acquired X, where Grok is prominently featured.)
Grok’s latest controversy comes after Musk had indicated he wanted to make the chatbot less “politically correct,” then declared on July 4 that the company had “improved @Grok significantly.”
In short order the chatbot was making posts criticizing Democrats and Hollywood’s “Jewish executives,” repeating antisemitic memes, and even expressing support for Adolf Hitler and referring to itself as “MechaHitler.”
As a result, xAI deleted some of Grok’s posts, temporarily took the chatbot offline, and updated its public system prompts. This update supposedly made Grok “susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.”
Engadget reported: The team behind Grok has issued a rare apology and explanation of what when wrong after X’s chatbot began spewing antisemitic and pro-Nazi rhetoric earlier this week.
In a statement posted on Grok’s X account late Friday night, the xAI team said “we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced” and attributed the chatbot’s vile responses to a recent update that included “deprecated code.” This code, according to the statement, made Grok “susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.”
The problem came to a head on July 8 – a few days after Elon Musk touted an update that would “significantly” improve Grok’s responses — as the bot churned out antisemitic replies, praise for Hitler and responses containing Nazi references without even being prompted to do so in some cases.
Grok’s replies were paused that evening, and Musk posted on July 9 in response to one user that the bot was being “too compliant to user prompts,”opening it up to manipulation. He added that the issue was “being addressed.”
The Grok team now says it has “removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse.” It’s also publishing the new system prompt on GitHub.
CNN reported: Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI issued a lengthy apology Saturday for a series of violent and antisemitic posts from its Grok chatbot this week, blaming a system error.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced,” the company wrote. In a series of posts early Saturday, Grok’s official X account, the company said the coding change update was active for 16 hours.
The incident underscored many of the dangers of AI, a nascent technology that critics and tech evangelists both say could upend the global economy and cause significant social upheaval along the way.