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 “white genocide” in South Africa, even when the user didn’t ask anything about the subject.
The strange responses stem 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.”
Grok’s odd, unrelated replies are a reminder that AI chatbots are still a nascent technology, and may not always be a reliable source for information. In recent months, AI model providers have struggled to moderate the responses of their AI chatbots, which have led to odd behaviors.
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.
In one example of Grok’s misbehavior, 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.
Whatever the cause of the bug may have been, Grok appears to be responding more normally to users now. A spokesperson for xAI did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
