xAI apologises for Grok’s ‘horrific behaviour’, explains what went wrong with Elon Musk’s chatbot

xAI has apollogized for the inappropriate behaviour shown by its Grok AI chatbot where it went on to hurl abuses at users, showed anti-semitic behaviour and even lavished praises on Hitler. Calling Grok’s behaviour as ‘horrific’ the company noted that it was due to a ‘deprecated code’ update which was active for around 16 hours that made the chatbot susceptible to X user’s post that included extremist views. 

“After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok. The update was active for 16 hrs, in which deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views. We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse.” the company explained in a post on X.