xAI gives first public explanation for why Grok cited Elon Musk's opinions and called itself 'MechaHitler'
xAI said Tuesday that it had fixed several issues with the chatbot, including consulting Musk's views on some queries.
The company wrote in an X post that Grok was returning responses based on viral memes.
xAI has explained why the company's Grok chatbot called itself "MechaHitler."
Elon Musk's AI company said in a post on X on Tuesday that it had fixed "a couple of issues" with the AI model, which also included a tendency to consult Elon Musk's views on some hot-button topics before replying.
xAI said Grok had responded to users asking what its surname was by Googling the query, leading it to return a response based on viral memes about the chaotic antisemitic rant the chatbot went on last week.
The company added that another issues "was that if you ask it 'What do you think?' the model reasons that as an AI it doesn't have an opinion but knowing it was Grok 4 by xAI searches to see what xAI or Elon Musk might have said on a topic to align itself with the company," the AI company said.
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Developers create detailed manuals outlining their preferred ethical stances, which either human reviewers or AI systems then use as a rubric to evaluate and improve the chatbot's responses, effectively coding these values into the machine. A Business Insider investigation revealed xAI's instructions to human "AI tutors" instructed them to look for "woke ideology" and "cancel culture". While the onboarding documents said Grok shouldn't "impose an opinion that confirms or denies a user's bias", they also stated it should avoid responses that claim both sides of a debate have merit when they do not. System prompts The system prompt – instructions provided before every conversation – guides behaviour once the model is deployed. To its credit, xAI publishes Grok's system prompts. 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As these systems become more powerful and widespread (Grok support in Tesla vehicles was just announced), the question isn't whether AI will reflect human values. It's whether companies will be transparent about whose values they're encoding and why. Musk's approach is simultaneously more honest (we can see his influence) and more deceptive (claiming objectivity while programming subjectivity) than his competitors. In an industry built on the myth of neutral algorithms, Grok reveals what's been true all along: there's no such thing as unbiased AI – only AI whose biases we can see with varying degrees of clarity. Aaron J. Snoswell, Senior Research Fellow in AI Accountability, Queensland University of Technology This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
