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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said an “unauthorized modification” to its chatbot Grok was the reason why it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” on social media this week.
An employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said in an explanation posted late Thursday that promised reforms.
A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself before the fixes were made Wednesday, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group that came after Trump suspended refugee programs and halted arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression by the Afrikaner-led apartheid government that ruled South Africa until 1994. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on the software development site GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”
Among the instructions to Grok shown on GitHub on Thursday were: “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.”
Noting that some had “circumvented” its existing code review process, xAI also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump lashed out Friday at the Supreme Court after it blocked his bid to resume deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members, saying the justices are “not allowing me to do what I was elected to do.”

Trump’s berating of the high court, in a post on social media, came after it dealt another setback to his attempt to swiftly expel alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members using an obscure wartime law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA).
Trump has been at loggerheads with the judiciary ever since he returned to the White House, venting his fury at numerous court rulings at various levels that have frozen his executive orders on multiple issues.
In a 7-2 decision, the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which includes three justices nominated by Trump, blocked his bid to use the AEA to carry out further deportations of TdA members, saying they were not being given enough time to legally contest their removal.
Trump, who campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants, said the Supreme Court decision means the government will have to go through a “long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process” to expel “murderers, drug dealers (and) gang members.”
“THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES IS NOT ALLOWING ME TO DO WHAT I WAS ELECTED TO DO,” he said. “THIS IS A BAD AND DANGEROUS DAY FOR AMERICA!“

On Elon Musk’s X platform, Trump also accused the nation’s highest court of “being played by radical left losers.”

Trump invoked the AEA, which was last used to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II, in March to deport a first group of alleged TdA members to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process.
Attorneys for several of the deported Venezuelans have said their clients were not gang members, had committed no crimes and were targeted largely on the basis of their tattoos.
The Supreme Court intervened on April 19 to temporarily block further deportations of undocumented Venezuelan migrants, saying they must be afforded due process.
In Friday’s unsigned order, the court paused plans to deport another group of detainees held in Texas, saying they were not being given enough time to mount a meaningful legal challenge to their expulsion.
“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the justices said.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Alito complaining that his colleagues had departed from their usual practices and seemingly decided issues without an appeals court weighing in. “But if it has done so, today’s order is doubly extraordinary,” Alito wrote.

Trump thanked them in his Truth Social post for “attempting to protect our Country.”

In a separate opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with the majority but would have preferred the nation’s highest court to jump in now definitively, rather than return the case to an appeals court. “The circumstances,” Kavanaugh wrote, “call for a prompt and final resolution.”

The justices also noted that a Salvadoran man had been deported to El Salvador “in error” along with the alleged TdA members in March and the Trump administration has claimed “it is unable to provide for (his) return.”
The justices stressed they were not deciding whether Trump could legally use the AEA to deport undocumented migrants, and they ordered a lower court to “expeditiously” examine the question.
“To be clear, we decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given,” they said.
“We did not on April 19 — and do not now — address the underlying merits of the parties’ claims regarding the legality of removals under the AEA.
“We recognize the significance of the Government’s national security interests as well as the necessity that such interests be pursued in a manner consistent with the Constitution,” they said.
Three federal district court judges have ruled that Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to carry out deportations was unconstitutional while one, a Trump appointee, said it was permissible.
In invoking the AEA, Trump said TdA was engaged in “hostile actions” and “threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.”
Since taking office, Trump has sent troops to the Mexican border, imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada for allegedly not doing enough to stop illegal crossings, and designated gangs like TdA and MS-13 as terrorist groups.