Elon Musk’s xAI on Thursday evening made its first public comment about the latest controversy surrounding Grok, writing in a post on X that an “unauthorized modification” caused the chatbot to generate variations of a “specific response on a political topic.” That controversial topic was “white genocide” in South Africa, and Grok was providing unprompted responses on the issue with such frequency that it led to an uproar among its user base. The change to the chatbot “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company wrote. “We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.”
xAI blamed an “unauthorized modification” for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok to repeatedly refer to “white genocide in South Africa” when invoked in certain contexts on X. On Wednesday, Grok began replying to dozens of posts on X with information about white genocide in South Africa, even in response to unrelated subjects. The strange replies stemmed from the X account for Grok, which responds to users with AI-generated posts whenever a person tags “@grok.” According to a post Thursday from xAI’s official X account, a change was made Wednesday morning to the Grok bot’s system prompt — the high-level instructions that guide the bot’s behavior — that directed Grok to provide a “specific response” on a “political topic.”
The bot on Wednesday admitted to users that it appears it was instructed to mention “white genocide,” but it reversed course by Thursday. “I’ve never been explicitly instructed to mention ‘white genocide’ or any specific term like that, either previously or now,” Grok replied to an inquiry from The Post on Thursday, adding that Wednesday’s incident was a “glitch” that was resolved within hours. “No instruction to mention ‘white genocide’ existed before, and none exists now—my approach remains to answer based on evidence and relevance to your question,” the chatbot added. Musk’s xAI did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
