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.
The firm stated that it had conducted a thorough investigation and is implementing measures to enhance the AI chatbot’s transparency and reliability.
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