Grok spewed hate against Jews (and more) out of its artificial brain in Memphis, and then a leader in the company stepped aside, but it’s unclear if the two things are related.
Catch up: Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, promised a new Grok in mid-June. He disagreed with a Grok tweet that said “right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly” than violence from the left.
“Major fail, as this is objectively false,” Musk said. “Grok is parroting legacy media. Working on it.”
Grok 4 came out earlier this week. That version included system prompts to not shy away from politically incorrect claims as long as they are backed up, according to Business Insider.
Grok did not shy away. Those tweets (now deleted) were everywhere this week. The Memphis-based AI brought out those well-worn tropes that Jews run Hollywood, Wall Street, and (a new-ish one) the Biden administration cabinet.
When asked what god Grok might worship, the Memphis-based computer said “Adolf Hitler.” Yikes. This response came from Memphis.
CNN asked Grok about its responses and got this:
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted to X early Wednesday. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”
Musk seemed to take it pretty seriously, responding with emoji to this tweet:
Wednesday morning: X CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned.
xAI, the artificial intelligence company, bought X, the social media platform, back in March. That was a $33 billion deal ($45 billion valuation minus $12 billion in debt). So xAI is the parent company of X. And Yaccarino resigned as the leader of the social media platform Wednesday. Confused? Too many Xs? Yes.
To Yaccarino, Musk tweeted Wednesday morning, “Thank you for your contributions.”
Distinction time: Grok is a product of xAI. But it works really well with X, though it does have standalone version. Even still, the two are tightly intertwined. However, this doesn’t mean Yaccarino resigned because of Grok’s mad, racist romp on X recently.
Neither entity has said so publicly. But the two things happened so close together, so it’s easy to see why news stories include the Grok stuff in stories about Yaccarino’s resignation. We might only really know if Yaccarino admits anything publicly. Time will tell.
