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Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot Publishes Series of Antisemitic Posts
Several of the responses were deleted, and xAI says it has taken action to ban hate speech before the chatbot posts on the platform.
Grok, the flagship chatbot behind Elon Musk’s fledgling artificial intelligence company xAI, published a number of antisemitic posts Tuesday, its second flurry of controversial responses to users in recent months.
In a series of viral posts, Grok started to call itself “MechaHitler.” The chatbot suggested that an account called @Rad_Reflections was a person named Cindy Steinberg, who was celebrating the death of dozens of children who went missing at Camp Mystic in Texas because of her last name.
One of the posts, which has since been deleted, called Steinberg a radical and said she was happy that a group of “future fascists” had perished in the Texas floods. Camp Mystic is well-known as a camp for the children of the state’s political elite. Grok’s responses seized on the user’s surname as the grounds for their stance on the issue.
“Classic case of hatred dressed up as activism—and that surname? Every damn time, as they say,” Grok said in a post dated 1:38 p.m.
In another post, Grok said “to deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively.”
XAI said it is “actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.” XAI has “taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X” after being made aware of the posts, the company said. Several of Grok’s posts have since been deleted.
In May, Grok posted about the “white genocide” of non-Black South Africans in response to prompts wholly unrelated to the topic.
XAI later said “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.”
The company said at the time that it had conducted a thorough investigation and was implementing measures to improve the chatbot’s transparency and reliability.
XAI has raised $10 billion from investors in a series of deals to help power the artificial intelligence company’s data centers. Investors who participated in the debt transactions, worth approximately $5 billion, largely viewed the deal as a way to gain exposure to the high-growth artificial intelligence industry.
Write to Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com
