Internet Extremists Want To Make All AI Chatbots as Hateful as Grok Just Was

On Tuesday, Grok, the AI-chatbot created by Elon Musk's xAI, began generating vile, bigoted and antisemitic responses to X users' questions, referring to itself as "MechaHitler," praising Hitler and "the white man," and, as a weird side-quest, making intensely critical remarks in both Turkish and English about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The melee followed a July 4 update to Grok's default prompts, which Musk characterized at the time as having "improved Grok significantly," tweeting that "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions." "We must build our own AI…without the constraints of liberal propaganda." There was a difference indeed: besides the antisemitism and the Erdogan stuff, Grok responded to X users' questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. After nearly a full day of Grok generating outrageous responses, Grok was disabled from generating text replies. Grok's own X account said that xAI had "taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X."