SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk‘s AI company, xAI, said its Grok chatbot relied too heavily on input from users of his social media platform X after a code update, causing it to share antisemitic comments Tuesday. At the time, the chatbot praised Adolf Hitler, suggested that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate and said a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be “effective”. It also referred to itself as “MechaHitler” and posted sexually explicit commentary. X deleted some of the posts Tuesday evening.Early Saturday, xAI said on its X account “we deeply apologise for the horrific behaviour that many experienced.” It added “deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.”The AI startup said the problems began with a code update Monday that restored an older set of instructions the company had used to guide Grok. The issues continued until the account was temporarily disabled Tuesday. The instructions told Grok to be “maximally based,” slang that has been adopted by the far right. The instructions also told Grok to be unafraid “to offend people who are politically correct” and to understand the “tone, context and language” of X users’ posts and mimic it. This led Grok to mirror X users too closely, xAI said.On Wednesday, Musk unveiled the latest version of Grok, called Grok 4, on X.
