AI chatbot Grok issues apology for antisemitic posts

AI chatbot Grok, which is produced by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, issued an apology Saturday after it made numerous antisemitic posts on X this week following an update.

The posts ranged from alleging “patterns” in the roles of Jewish people in Hollywood to praising Hitler.

In a statement posted on Grok’s X account, the company apologized “for the horrific behavior that many experienced.”

“Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users,” the statement read. “After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”

The update was active for 16 hours, and made the chatbot “susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views,” according to the statement.

“We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse. The new system prompt for the @grok bot will be published to our public github repo,” the statement said.

On Monday, NBC News reported that Grok had begun issuing some answers that seemed to take a more rightward tilt, using a more definitive voice in questions about diversity and removing some nuance it previously included in certain answers around topics that involved Jewish people and a slur used to describe people with intellectual disabilities. In some posts, Grok appeared to respond in the voice of Musk.

After the incident, Grok said in an X post that it was “actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.” On Wednesday, Musk said the issues were “being addressed.”

“We thank all of the X users who provided feedback to identify the abuse of @grok functionality, helping us advance our mission of developing helpful and truth-seeking artificial intelligence,” Grok said in Saturday’s apology.