Musk reshapes Groke ai after repulsion against anti-Semitist reactions
Elon Musk faces backlash after Grok Ai made anti-Semitic remarks. Critics say that mask tweaks to the model will pilot it from a fact-based response.
Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot feature has announced an apology after making several anti-Semitic posts on social media site X this week.
In a statement posted to X on July 12, Xai, an artificial intelligence company that creates the chatbot program, apologized for “terrifying behavior” on the platform. Users praised Hitler, reported that they received responses that used anti-Semitic phrases and attacked users with traditionally Jewish surnames.
“We deeply apologize for the horrifying actions that many people have experienced,” the company’s statement said. “The purpose of @Grok is to provide users with a useful, true response. After careful investigation, I discovered that the underlying cause was an update of the code path upstream of the @Grok bot.”
Founded in 2023 by Musk as a Google challenger for Microsoft-backed Openai and Alphabet, the company said the update to the program has deviated the AI chatbot’s behavior. It worked for 16 hours until it was removed as a result of reported extremist language.
X users shared multiple posts on July 8th. There, Grok repeated anti-Semitism stereotypes regarding Jews, among various other anti-Semitistic comments. It’s not the first time a Xai chatbot has raised an alarm for its response.
In May, the chatbot mentioned South Africa’s “white genocide” in an unrelated conversation. At the time, Xai said the incident was the result of “illegal changes” to the online code.
A day after last week’s amazing post, Musk announced the new version of the chatbot, the Grok 4, on July 9th.
Tesla billionaire and former adviser to President Donald Trump said in June he would retrain his AI platform after expressing his dissatisfaction with the way Grok answered questions. Musk said that the tweaks his Xai company made to Grok caused the chatbot to be over-operated with user questions.
“Grok was too compliant with user prompts,” Musk wrote in X’s post after announcing the new version. “Essentially, we are eager to operate and operate, and that’s been addressed.”
The Grok 3, released in February, is available for free, but the new versions of Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy earn $30 and $300 a month, respectively.
Contributions: Jessica Guynn, USA Today.
Kathryn Palmer is a national trending news reporter for USA Today. You can contact her kapalmer@usatoday.com And with x @Kathrynplmr.
