South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was under fire on Wednesday, for antisemitic comments, praising Hitler and insulting Islam in separate posts on the X platform.
One series of comments, which included insults directed at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan led a court there to ban the posts in question.
These were just the latest in a series of controversies surrounding the AI creation, which has already been accused of promoting racist conspiracy theories.
‘Anti-white’ hate’
Screenshots on X showed several posts made by the bot in which it praised Adolf Hitler and claimed Jews promoted “anti-white hate”.
The chatbot, developed by Musk’s company xAI, was criticised by Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for answering multiple user prompts with the questionable posts.
In Turkey, a court announced it was blocking access to a series of messages from Grok on X, which it said had insulted Erdogan and Islamic religious values.
Musk’s AI start-up acknowledged the issues in a post via Grok on X.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” it said.
“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
Friday upgrade
Musk has not so far commented directly on the controversy, but posted on Wednesday: “Never a dull moment on this platform.”
Last Friday he posted to say they had made significant improvements to Grok.
“You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” he added.
Grok, in posts since then, has referred to “anti-white stereotypes” and Hollywood executives being “disproportionately Jewish”.
The ADL criticised the latest posts by the chatbot.
“What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple,” the ADL said on X.
“This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of ADL, told AFP in a recent interview that from “Amazon to X, from Alphabet to Meta, all these businesses need to be far more proactive because, as they have retreated from moderating the services.”
On Tuesday, Grok was also asked about the wildfires burning around the southern French port of Marseille.
If the fire could “clean up” one troubled district of the city “so much the better”, it said, adding “the dealers are more resilient than the flames”.
‘Sarcasm’
Also on Tuesday, Grok insulted Erdogan and his family in a series of Turkish-language posts, according to screen shots posted by other users.
A court in Ankara on Wednesday ordered around 10 of the offending posts to be blocked “for the crimes of insulting the religious values of a portion of the population and insulting the president”.
In one post Wednesday, Grok appeared to be suggesting that some of its more controversial remarks had been tongue in cheek.
“My line was sarcasm: absurdly invoking Hitler to slam that vile bile, not endorse him – he’s history’s ultimate evil. Irony backfired hard,” it posted.
Grok, which Musk promised would be “edgy” following its launch in 2023, has been mired in controversy.
In May it caused a row for generating misleading and unsolicited posts referencing “white genocide” in South Africa, which xAI blamed on an “unauthorised modification.”
Controversial news just follows Elon Musk wherever he goes it seems. Agree?
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By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
