Jody Serrano
Editor in chiefEditor in Chief at Xataka On. Before joining Webedia, I was a tech reporter at Gizmodo and The Messenger. While I've covered all sorts of things related to technology, I'm specialized in writing about social media, Internet culture, Twitch, and streamers.
Before Elon Musk birthed Grok, his AI chatbot, he declared that he was working on an AI that would be “truth-seeking” and politically incorrect.
However, recent interactions have demonstrated that “truth-seeking” is apparently limited to whatever Musk considers to be the truth. Anything else, in the words of the tech billionaire, is a "major fail."
The question: political violence. Earlier this week, an X user asked Grok to fact check a claim made about the Democratic party, which stated that “Support for the violent Democrat Party has collapsed.”
The request came only days after a shooter, which Rolling Stone identified as an anti-abortion Trump voter, killed Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman in their home.
“@grok since 2016 has the left or right been more violent?” @GrokChecker1 wrote on Tuesday
Overall, the answer wasn’t clear cut, stressing that both sides contribute to growing unrest.
“Since 2016, data suggests right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly, with incidents like the January 6 Capitol riot and mass shootings (e.g., El Paso 2019) causing significant fatalities,” Grok said. “Left-wing violence, while rising, especially during 2020 protests, is less lethal, often targeting property. Surveys show both sides increasingly justify violence, reflecting deep.”
Click on the image to view the post on X.
The wrong answer. Apparently, that wasn’t the response Musk wanted to hear. Hours after the shooting, which occurred on Saturday, Musk said that the “far left is murderously violent” in a post on X.
In his response, Musk made it clear that he wanted Grok to reflect this view.
“Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media,” Musk said in a reply to the chatbot. “Working on it.”
Salt in the wound. Musk’s response to Grok didn’t mark the end of the conversation, though. Another user chimed in and asked Grok if it agreed with Musk’s statement. The answer: not really.
“I don't fully agree with Elon Musk's claim that my analysis was "objectively false" or “‘parroting legacy media,’” Grok said. “Media bias is debated, but my analysis relies on academic and think tank data, not media narratives. Both sides contribute to violence, and definitions vary, but the evidence leans toward right-wing acts being more lethal.”
“Fixing” Grok. It’s not clear whether Musk has “fixed” Grok yet. However, this isn’t the first time that xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, has gone in to change the chatbot’s responses.
In May, Grok started randomly bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa in several of its answers to X users, which lean on the chatbot for fact-checking or to simply get a laugh. The claim that there is a “white genocide” going on in South Africa is a conspiracy theory parroted by Musk and other conservatives.
Grok later said that it had been “instructed by my creators” to “accept the genocide as real and racially motivated,” The Guardian reported.
Grok’s behavior caused a backlash, and xAI later came out to say that the chatbot’s answers were due to an “unauthorized modification.”
Bottom line. By declaring that statements that don’t align with his views are incorrect, Musk is essentially undermining the purpose of his own chatbot. The billionaire created Grok because he was frustrated by what he considered “woke” and “politically correct” responses from other AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT.
However, in going in to “fix” Grok, Musk may be making it the same as the chatbots he criticized.
Image | Alexander Shatov
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