Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok appeared to experience a bug on Wednesday that caused it to reply to dozens of posts on X with information about genocide in South Africa, even when the user didn’t ask anything about the subject.
The strange responses largely came from the X account for Grok, which replies to users with AI-generated posts whenever a user tags @grok. When asked about unrelated topics, Grok repeatedly told users about a “white genocide,” as well as the anti-apartheid chant “kill the boer.”
In one example, a user asked Grok about a professional baseball player’s salary, and Grok responded that “The claim of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa is highly debated.”
Several users posted on X about their confusing, odd interactions with the Grok AI chatbot on Wednesday.
It’s unclear at this time what the cause of Grok’s odd answers are, but xAI’s chatbots have been manipulated in the past.
In February, Grok 3 appeared to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. At the time, xAI engineering lead Igor Babuschkin seemed to confirm that Grok was briefly instructed to do so, though the company quickly reversed the instruction after the backlash drew greater attention.
A spokesperson for xAI did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
AI model providers have struggled to moderate the responses of their AI chatbots in recent months. OpenAI recently was forced to roll back an update to ChatGPT that caused the AI chatbot to be overly sycophantic. Meanwhile, Google has faced problems with its Gemini chatbot refusing to answer, or giving misinformation, around political topics.
