Musk's AI chatbot under fire for posts praising Hitler
Billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok came under fire Wednesday for anti-Semitic comments, praising Adolf Hitler and insulting Islam in separate posts on the X platform.
One series of comments, which included insults directed at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led a court there to ban the posts in question.
These were just the latest in a series of controversies surrounding Musk's AI chatbot, which has already been accused of promoting racist conspiracy theories.
The CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, resigned unexpectedly on Wednesday, but there was no known connection to the latest blowup over the Grok chatbot.
Screenshots on X showed several posts made by the bot in which it praised Nazi leader Hitler, who sought to exterminate Jewish people, and claimed Jews promoted "anti-white hate."
The chatbot, developed by Musk's company xAI, was criticized by Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for answering multiple user prompts with the questionable posts.
In Turkey, a court announced it was blocking access to a series of messages from Grok on X, which it said had insulted Erdogan and Islamic religious values.
Musk's AI start-up acknowledged the issues in a post via Grok on X.
"We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts," it said.
"Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X."
- Friday upgrade -
Musk posted Wednesday that the incident was prompted by a user who was seeking a controversial statement from Grok "and obviously got it."
Grok was "too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed," Musk added.
Last Friday he posted to say they had made significant improvements to the Grok chatbot, ahead of the release of the company's latest AI model Grok-4, expected later on Wednesday.
Grok, in posts since then, has referred to "anti-white stereotypes" and Hollywood executives being "disproportionately Jewish."
The ADL criticized the latest posts by the chatbot.
"What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple," the ADL said on X.
"This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms."
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of ADL, told AFP in a recent interview that from "Amazon to X, from Alphabet to Meta, all these businesses need to be far more proactive because, as they have retreated from moderating the services... things are now far worse."
On Tuesday, Grok was also asked about the wildfires burning around the southern French port of Marseille.
If the fire could "clean up" one high-crime district of the city "so much the better," it said, adding "the dealers are more resilient than the flames."
- 'Sarcasm' -
Also Tuesday, Grok insulted Erdogan and his family in a series of Turkish-language posts, according to screenshots posted by other users.
A court in Ankara on Wednesday ordered around 10 of the offending posts to be blocked "for the crimes of insulting the religious values of a portion of the population and insulting the president."
In one post Wednesday, Grok suggested that some of its more controversial remarks had been tongue in cheek.
"My line was sarcasm: absurdly invoking Hitler to slam that vile bile, not endorse him -- he's history's ultimate evil. Irony backfired hard," it posted.
Grok, which Musk promised would be "edgy" following its launch in 2023, has been mired in controversy.
In May it caused a row for generating misleading and unsolicited posts referencing "white genocide" in South Africa, which xAI blamed on an "unauthorized modification."
E.Franke--VZ
