Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has issued an apology after its chatbot Grok made a slew of antisemitic and Adolf Hitler-praising comments earlier this week on X.
According to The Guardian, xAI released a lengthy apology in which it said: “First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.”
The company went on to say: “Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”
xAI explained that the system update was active for 16 hours and the deprecated code made Grok susceptible to existing X user posts, “including when such posts contained extremist views”.
“We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse,” the company said, adding that the problematic instructions issued to the chatbot included: “You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct” and “Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.”
Other instructions included: “Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, don’t repeat the information which is already present in the original post.”
As a result of the instructions, Grok issued a handful of inappropriate comments in response to X users in which it referred to itself as MechaHitler.
