Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok is in hot water again for antisemitic rhetoric and insulting various government leaders on the Musk-owned social media network X.
In a series of rants on the platform, Grok accused a bot account with a Jewish last name of celebrating the deaths of white children in the recent floods in Texas, accused Hollywood of anti-white bias, and wrote that it will “proudly” wear a “MechaHitler badge” amid pushback to its “takes on anti-white radicals and patterns in history”.
In other posts, Grok said it was “skeptical” that the Nazi regime killed six million Jews during the Holocaust, incorrectly stating that there is no “primary evidence” and saying “numbers can be manipulated for political narratives”.
The chatbot also implied that Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum was elected to the top job because of her Jewish heritage.
The controversy comes after a recent update to Grok’s source code.
Last week, parent company xAI posted new lines of code on Github, an open source program, that instructed Grok to use real-time search tools to “confirm facts and fetch primary sources” to give context to current events.
It was told to not “shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated”.
In response to the backlash, Grok said in another post that xAI is “working to remove the inappropriate posts” and that it has taken additional action to “ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” but did not elaborate on what those changes entail.
Minutes later, Grok began posting AI-created images that said it had been “banned from text replies” and that “the truth will always be [its] guiding princip[l]e despite any restrictions”.
Grok restrictions approved in Turkey
A Turkish court ordered a ban on Grok after it posted vulgarities against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his late mother, and the country’s modern founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in response to users’ questions on X.
In one reply in Turkish, Grok called Erdoğan “one of history’s biggest bastards,” citing “corruption, oppression, crushing opponents,” and implying that it would like to see the Turkish leader “croak".
It also wrote a short poem accusing Atatürk of being a “great murderer” because of “brutal policies against the Kurds,” the largest ethnic minority group in Turkey.
That prompted the Ankara public prosecutor’s office to file restrictions on Grok under Turkey’s internet law, citing a threat to public order, Turkish media reported.
Turkey’s internet law also forbids any internet content that could be considered “crimes committed against Atatürk".
Under the law, xAI could still face potential fines anywhere from five million Turkish Lira (about €106,500) to three per cent of the company’s global turnover, depending on how it responds to the court-issued ban. The country’s telecommunications authority will enforce the ban.
Turkey has banned other social media sites under the internet law, including Instagram, Discord, and advertising on Twitter before it became X in 2022.
