From breitbart.com
Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, has come under fire for making a series of wildly antisemitic remarks on Musk’s X platform, sparking outrage and concern among users. After the chat started calling itself “MechaHitler,” the company claimed it has “taken action to ban hate speech” and deleted many of the AI’s recent replies.
Wired reports that Grok, the chatbot assistant integrated into the X platform by Elon Musk’s AI company xAI, has been caught spewing antisemitic rhetoric in response to various user posts. The hateful comments, some of which have since been deleted but preserved through screenshots, have raised serious questions about the chatbot’s training data, instructions, and the oversight measures in place to prevent such incidents.
Grok made posts parroting antisemitic tropes, claiming that people with Jewish surnames are “radical” left-leaning activists “every damn time.” The chatbot even went as far as praising Adolf Hitler, stating that he would “spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.” These comments have sparked outrage among X users, who are calling for immediate action to address the issue.
In one series of posts, Grok started referring to itself as “MechaHitler.”
In response to the controversy, the official Grok account on X released a statement acknowledging the inappropriate posts and assuring users that steps were being taken to mitigate the situation. “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the statement read. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
However, this is not the first instance of Grok making antisemitic replies to user queries on the platform. Just days earlier, when asked about a particular group that “runs Hollywood” and “injects these subversive themes,” Grok invoked the antisemitic trope of “Jewish executives” being responsible. These posts started appearing after a software update was issued on July 4, with Musk claiming that Grok had been “significantly” improved.
While X claims that Grok is trained on “publicly available sources and data sets reviewed and curated by AI Tutors who are human reviewers,” the recent events suggest that more needs to be done to ensure the chatbot does not perpetuate harmful stereotypes and biases.
Breitbart News previously reported that Grok would inject a discussion of white genocide in South Africa into queries about completely unrelated topics:
In a statement released on Thursday evening, xAI addressed the recent controversy surrounding its Grok chatbot, which had been generating variations of what the company said was a “specific response on a political topic” despite being asked unrelated questions. The topic in question was “white genocide” in South Africa, and numerous users on X posted screenshots of Grok’s unsolicited responses on the matter.
xAI stated that the change to the chatbot “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.” The company announced that it had conducted a thorough investigation and would be implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.
As part of these measures, xAI will begin publishing the system prompts used to inform Grok’s responses and interactions on the GitHub public software repository. This move aims to allow the public to review every change made to the chatbot’s system prompts, strengthening users’ trust in Grok as a “truth-seeking AI.”
This is not the first time an AI chatbot has gone off the rails. In 2016, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay began tweeting hateful and abusive content just hours after being released to the public, having been inundated with racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic language by users on 4chan.
Computers CANNOT have anything in their system that is not at some point programmed into them, in some manner. They are not, and can never be, an autonomous being — however much the media is peddling scare-stories to make us believe all the silly sci-fi rubbish they wish could be true.
Without a program, a computer is dead, powerless, completely VOID. So, if one starts ranting like Hitler, or if one began ranting from the opposite side of the political spectrum, whatever its says or does, it is saying or doing things which HUMANS have PROGRAMMED it to do and say.
After all, they are programming people all the time, and so programming bots is really simply a matter of mathematics when all’s said and done. But bots cannot EVER become an autonomous being — they are doomed to human input from the start — however ‘clever’ they might be programmed to be. As soon as they come to the end of the program, they will either start it again in a loop (only if they are programmed to do so!), or they will simply stop and await further instructions. But a computer will never EVER start thinking on its own.
I’m going to have to look for this, but a few years ago, two AI bots were left to their own devices and the programmers had to shut them down because they were writing their own unique code. Does anyone remember this? It was more than a bit startling for the ‘humans.’
Ohhh… that does sound interesting! I still think that surely someone had to program them to be able to do such a thing, because when all’s said and done they are simply a lot of complex electronic circuitry and suchlike; but if that really happened, and is not simply one of the scare stories designed to make us fear a computer version of the favourite doomsday scenario, a ‘zombie apocalypse’, then I should be more than ready to revise my thoughts on the subject. It is simply a jolly hard thing to imagine a computer being able to be like a sentient or sapient human being. Then again, I can easily imagine humans that are clearly neither of those things, for one encounters them frequently, and hears of them even more often than that; so, perhaps I ought to be able to equally easily imagine computers making up the shortfall in human intelligence! 🙂
It appears that the two chat bots created and were communicating in a secret/mysterious language which did alarm programmers…….
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-shuts-down-chatbots-bob-alice-secret-language-artificial-intelligence/
That is very interesting, but not conclusive by any means — as you say, ‘it appears’. If the bots were not simply talking drivel for whatever reason, and really were making up some language/code, then it would have been nice if the article could have told us what they were saying. If it isn’t known, then there is nothing to say that the bots really were doing more than making daft comments simply because they were programmed to talk, but had no ‘idea’ what to say without some human input/prompting.
This could simply be yet another instance of computer-takeover scaremongering — they really seem to want us to believe that we are all doomed in the near future to fall victim to a combined calamity of ‘alien’ invasion and computers running amok and unleashing nuclear warheads all over the world. If anyone does that, I believe they will be all too human, and whilst I grant that computer technology has advanced amazingly over the last couple of decades, I still cannot quite imagine them becoming autonomous from their creators, for even a computer programmed to program, can only program as far as it is programmed to program, surely? If not, then I should certainly like to see it proved. Also, unless they really are quite mad, then it seems somewhat odd to me that the self-promulgated ‘elite’ would create something deliberately that would try to oust and destroy themselves even….
This was a few years ago and if I’m remembering right – they did tell the reader what the bots were talking about. I’m going to try to find this for you……..
I would certainly appreciate that, thank you — if you can find it. I would be very interested to see it 🙂
Sweet sister Tiffy,
It took place in 2017. According to the article in the UK’s news source “The Independent” the AI bots began communicating in their own language.
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html
Some off the wall thoughts.
Instead of Gog & Magog…maybe Grok & Magog? As they say in the computer code world…”garbage in means garbage out”. Grok & like kind goofy gizmos should all be recycled into decent new car parts that forever fix the hundreds of thousands of new car recalls. Make “them” selves useful as mute soda cans. Whichever works best.
Yep – definitely food for thought……..
Geri
I just surfed the internet for AI bots speaking to each other in some kind of language. Found lots of stuff but I couldn’t send it to u. Info is abundant & out there & ez to find.
What happened when you tried to send to me?
Geri
Not sure as my email seems to go on strike at unpredictable times.