Grok’s behavior isn’t surprising – but we needn’t settle for Musk’s vision of the future
Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok went on a hateful tirade earlier this month. The AI-powered account praised Hitler and posted a series of antisemitic comments over X, the digital platform also owned by Musk. The company’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, resigned the next day – though it’s unclear whether her exit was directly related to the bot’s rant.
Posting on X, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said Grok’s behavior was “irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic”. xAI and the Grok account on X apologized for the incident, but days later released two chatbot “companions”, including an NSFW anime avatar available to children and a red panda character built to issue crude insults.
Samuel Woolley is the author Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity and co-author of Bots. He is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh
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