'MechaHitler': Elon Musk AI firm scrubs chatbot Grok's antisemitic rants
Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot praised Hitler, used antisemitic phrases and attacked users with traditionally Jewish surnames before it was reined in.
Users reported July 8 that they would get the disturbing phrases after typing in questions to the chatbot.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” Grok’s maker xAI said on the X social media platform. “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,” xAI said.
Musk, the Tesla billionaire and former adviser to President Donald Trump, said in June he would retrain the AI platform after expressing frustration with the way Grok answered questions. The artificial intelligence company released a new version of the AI chatbot over the weekend.
Musk said Grok had been “improved significantly” and that users would “notice a difference” when they asked questions.
On Wednesday, Musk said the tweaks his xAI company made to Grok made the chatbot too susceptible to being manipulated by users' questions.
“Grok was too compliant to user prompts,” Musk wrote in a post on X, replying to a user about the controversy. “Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed.”
Users on X shared posts Tuesday in which Grok praised Adolf Hitler and referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”
This is not the first time Grok has gone off script.
In May, the chatbot began bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa in unrelated conversations. At the time, xAI said the incident was the result of an “unauthorized modification” to its code.
Musk − the world's richest person with a net worth of $405 billion, according to Forbes − spent nearly $290 million to help Trump and other Republicans get elected. In the first months of Trump's second term, Musk led the effort to slash federal agencies through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
(This story has been updated with new information.)