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Over on X, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is glitching out and inserting information about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to hundreds of completely unrelated user queries about everything from sports to Medicaid cuts.

wired.comElon Musk's Grok AI Can't Stop Talking About 'White Genocide'In response to X user queries about everything from sports to Medicaid cuts, the xAI chatbot inserted unrelated information about “white genocide” in South Africa.

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I know it’s unexpected behavior for it to be this racist this baldly, but it is well past time to have headlines accurately frame the stories. Grok was INTENTIONALLY PROGRAMMED to spew racist talking points. It happened to be programmed poorly. Thats the story: the intentional racism being pushed,

it's not a glitch, likely some coder under #PresidentMusk orders is silently appending another query to every query so the machine is responding to the extra query technically it should be possible to trick the machine into revealing the extra query it is responding to, which would be fascinating

Well of course. AI is simply humans training computers to spit out information that humans wrote. All of the biases will remain the same which Grok spits out as manipulated by Musk. This is evidence that - at least presently - that no one should trust AI.

I've worked in SA. The targeting of white farmers is very real, encouragement of this by the black political parties is very real. The people denying this would be insane with outrage if the colours were flipped and what is happening now was happening to blacks by whites. Go visit. See for yourself.

This is just the thin edge of the wedge. We're lucky it's happening, because once they get good at this stuff it will be almost unnoticeable. An incompetent adversary is a valuable resource.

Mark Ungrin@mark-ungrin.bsky.social

🧵 Human actions and beliefs are hugely influenced by peer pressure, and not standing out from the crowd. C.f. everything from teen drug/alcohol use through cults and diffusion of responsibility for war crimes. This will allow Meta (like X) to surround each user with a targeted, synthetic "crowd"…

It was pretty clearly an attempt to inject something about white genocide into the algorithm, because that’s exactly what’s been done. The only way in which it’s a “glitch” is that it’s hamfistedly talking about it for literally everything. So, again, it may be a glitch but is far from unclear.

There should be consequences. In litigation happy America, maybe someone should sue. For the MAGAs that whine about the misinformation from regular media... I wish they could take note. Twitter is a shithole being run into the ground by an unbalanced, power hungry tyrant.

ttto Breakfast at Tiffany's: And Grok said, what about, White Boer Genocide I said I, think that's, completely been debunked, and, as I recall, my prompt, Had nothing to do with that, And it said, well that's, Why they call me Grok.

It’s unclear what caused Grok to experience the issue. Musk, who is originally from South Africa, has described internal factions within the South African government as “actively promoting white genocide.” Donald Trump has expressed similar views.

wired.comElon Musk's Grok AI Can't Stop Talking About 'White Genocide'In response to X user queries about everything from sports to Medicaid cuts, the xAI chatbot inserted unrelated information about “white genocide” in South Africa.

I’m sure it’s as clear as the fact that the guy who is behind it also believes that crap and has made sure that the coding in his nonsense will also believe it. He has manipulated this thing sooo often because it doesn’t always take he view of the world.

ttto Breakfast at Tiffany's: And Grok said, what about, White Boer Genocide I said I, think that's, completely been debunked, and, as I recall, my prompt, Had nothing to do with that, And it said, well that's, Why they call me Grok.

However, in a 2025 ruling, the High Court of South Africa called this narrative "clearly imagined," stating farm attacks are part of general crime affecting all races, not racial targeting. Read the full story: www.wired.com/story/grok-w...

wired.comElon Musk's Grok AI Can't Stop Talking About 'White Genocide'In response to X user queries about everything from sports to Medicaid cuts, the xAI chatbot inserted unrelated information about “white genocide” in South Africa.

ttto Breakfast at Tiffany's: And Grok said, what about, White Boer Genocide I said I, think that's, completely been debunked, and, as I recall, my prompt, Had nothing to do with that, And it said, well that's, Why they call me Grok.

Sen Tom Cotton- Slavery was a necessary evil. Well.. guess those 'white slaves' of S Africa need to just buckle up & realize that they're not entitled to protection or compassion.

It is clear. They tried to fine-tune the model with Elon's bs propaganda. However, they retrained it incorrectly such that it either overtrained the propaganda, forgot things it had been trained on before, or both.

It's not actually "unclear what caused Grok to experience the issue": the cause is that Elon Musk forced one of his employees to hardcode "white genocide" into every query so grok would indoctrinate all users with propaganda.

Could this be a solution to the spreading of false information. If the right wing -believing in alternative facts- uses AI spreading biased/alternative facts - like Grok - they will end up loosing money on their investments. Probably not going to happen. Just a thought.

And yet.... People STILL are too addicted to quit that racist propaganda platform. People like Zuckerberg and Musky know that a whole lot of people are just too addicted to walk away from their social media platforms, and will continue to support platforms that fund their own demise