Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has blamed an “unauthorized modification” to the Grok chatbot’s response, causing it to generate responses mentioning political and racial tensions in South Africa. On May 16, xAI provided an update on the Grok AI chatbot’s inflammatory responses, stating that on May 14, “an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X.”“This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” it added.
Grok generated responses on May 14, mentioning a “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa when answering completely unrelated questions about topics like baseball, enterprise software, and construction. The AI bot claimed it was “instructed by my creators” to accept this genocide as “real and racially motivated,” according to reports. In some responses, it acknowledged the mistake, saying “my response veered off-topic” and “I'll work on staying relevant,” but it would often continue discussing South Africa's racial politics in the same message.
Source: Grok Related: xAI engineer quits after post on Grok 3 AI rankingThis incident coincides with US President Trump granting asylum to white South Africans while he claimed they face “genocide” and that “white farmers are being brutally killed,” though no evidence supported these claims.
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Author / Journalist: Cointelegraph by Martin Young
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