Musk’s Grok spews antisemitic posts after “improvement”

A few weeks ago, after expressing his displeasure that his Grok chatbot was “parroting legacy media” when it wrote that data showed “right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly,” an accurate response, Elon Musk vowed to make some changes to fix the problem.

Musk’s plan to adjust the chatbot raised alarms that Grok, which lives on his X platform, would simply be trained to mirror his increasingly right-wing worldview in its responses to the 250 million daily users of the platform. Musk has repeatedly said that Grok would be “maximally truth seeking” and an alternative to mainstream news sources that he says are biased.

Musk posted that an updated version of Grok with “advanced reasoning” would “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” and would be retrained on that.

Less than two weeks later, Musk announced that Grok had been “improved significantly” and that users would notice a difference when they asked the chatbot questions.

They did.

Among the many troubling examples that users shared on social media, Grok used antisemitic tropes to attack Jewish movie executives, casting aspersions toward users with Jewish last names, and in a post that has since been deleted, when asked about a historical figure who might be best suited to deal with “anti-white hate,” Grok responded: “Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

Hours later, the official Grok account announced that “inappropriate” posts made by the chatbot were being removed.

On the GitHub repository, which has text instructions for Grok, one line was removed:

“The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”