Much like its creator, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.
The chatbot, made by Musk’s company xAI, kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers.
Musk, who was born in South Africa, frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behaviour, so she tried it herself, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement”.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland in the US.
“It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to”.
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday.
In a post Thursday evening, xAI said an "unauthorised modification" was made to Grok's chatbot that directed it to "provide a specific response on a political topic" on X, in violation of the company's "internal policies and core values".
Musk’s critiques of ‘woke AI’ and South Africa’s leaders
Musk has spent years criticising the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
He has also criticised his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems – but the lack of initial explanation about the “white genocide” responses forced those outside the company to make their best guesses.
Some asked Grok itself to explain, but like other chatbots, it is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinations, making it hard to determine if it was making things up.
Musk, an adviser to US President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide”.
Musk’s commentary – and Grok’s – escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the US as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group as Trump suspends refugee programmes and halts arrivals from other parts of the world.
Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
