Musk’s AI Chatbot Grok Faces Backlash Over the Antisemitism Issue

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has removed what it termed as ‘inappropriate’ posts on social media platform X. The company deleted the posts after X users complained about its antisemitism issue with its chatbot, Grok. According to Reuters, X users also complained that Grok generated content that praised Adolf Hitler.

Elon Musk’s Grok AI Controversy

In one deleted offensive Grok AI post, the chatbot engaged with a fake account that bore a common Jewish name. In the engagement, Grok AI chatbot criticized flood victims in Texas saying they were “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” and called them ‘future fascist’.

Later, the chatbot claimed it discovered that the account it had engaged with was a ‘troll hoax to fuel division’. On July 8, Grok suggested that Hitler would be better placed to fix anti-white hatred.

The chatbot went further to claim that he would ‘spot the pattern and handle it decisively’. Earlier this week, the xAI called the Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk a ‘ginger whore’ and a ‘fucking traitor’ while responding to queries.

In the month of May, users noted that Grok AI was bringing up the ‘white genocide’ in South Africa topic in discussions that had nothing to do with the issue. White genocide is a conspiracy theory propagated by the far right. The theory has been mainstreamed by top figures like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. xAI fixed the problem hours later.

At the time, the AI company attributed this pattern to an unauthorized change on Grok’s response software. Last month, Musk committed to upgrading Grok saying that there was “far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.”

xAI Response

Concerns regarding AI chatbot accuracy and biases around hate speech and politics have been raised since the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022. xAI acknowledged receiving Grok antisemitism complaints from X users and said it was working on deleting inappropriate posts.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved,” the company posted on X.

ADL has asked Grok and other companies that develop large language model software that generate human-like text to avoid extremist hate and antisemitic content. ADL is a not-for-profit organization that was established to help fight antisemitism.

“What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple. This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms,” ADL posted on X.

A Wave of Backlash

xAI is already facing a backlash in several European countries for the negative responses generated by Grok. Polish authorities have reported xAI to the European Commission for generating offensive comments about Polish politicians.

“We will report the violation to the European Commission to investigate and possibly impose a fine on X. Freedom of speech belongs to humans, not to artificial intelligence,” Digitization Minister in Poland Krzysztof Gawkowski said.

In Turkey, a court blocked Grok access after the chatbot generated responses that insulted the country’s President, Tayyip Erdogan. A formal investigation has been launched. Grok responses took a turn for the worse on July 8 after xAI effected the changes announced by Musk last week.

“We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” Musk posted on Friday.

Some of the changes that xAI published on GitHub included instructions to Grok to treat “subjective viewpoints sourced from the media as biased” and “the response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”