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Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, who previously made headlines over a ‘salute’ at Donald Trump’s inauguration and described a tweet which claimed Jewish communities have a “dialectical hatred” of white people as “the actual truth” (he later described this action as “foolish”), has once again found himself embroiled in an antisemitism scandal – this time over his AI chatbot, Grok.
What is Grok?
Developed by Musk’s company xAI, Grok is an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT which xAI describes as “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers”.
What’s the controversy?
On Friday, Musk tweeted that xAI had “improved Grok significantly”, and on Monday, The Verge reported that it was over that weekend that the chatbot was updated with instructions to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect”.
It comes after Musk criticised his own chatbot last month for “parroting legacy media” and said he was working to change it.
Except, in recent days, a number of responses from Grok have surfaced in which attack Jewish people in particular – such as when the chatbot complained about “anti-white stereotypes” and “forced diversity” in Hollywood.
The ‘Translate Hate Glossary’ from the American Jewish Committee states “false reports that claim Jews control the media … are part of a longstanding conspiracy of secret Jewish power” and that it is an “antisemitic trope rooted in the discredited publication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.
The Independent reports the chatbot has also been goaded into saying the Nazi slogan “Heil Hitler” and has claimed Jewish-sounding names are disproportionately linked “every damn time” to hate, radicalism and deceitfulness.
Several users have shared tweets in which Grok refers to itself as “MechaHitler”:
It’s even been banned in Turkey over allegations it insulted its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
And it’s not the first time that Grok’s answers have made headlines, as back in May it pushed claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa.
It’s since gone on to spark ‘woke’ memes…
With the intention behind the latest update being to move Grok away from apparent ‘wokeness’, Twitter/X users have since pointed out that the chatbot is battling it out between “Nazi Grok” and “Woke Grok”:
Another account imagined it as being like “the sunken place” from the horror film, Get Out:
And a third compared it to a scene from I, Robot:
What has Musk said about the scandal?
Not a lot, but on Wednesday he appeared to address the situation by tweeting: “Never a dull moment on this platform”.
Meanwhile, the team behind Grok have since issued a statement in which they said: “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.”
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