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X chief Linda Yaccarino resigns a day after Grok makes offensive remarks

X chief Linda Yaccarino resigns a day after Grok makes offensive remarks

The National09-07-2025
A day after X's AI chatbot Grok spewed offensive content, X chief executive Linda Yaccarino has announced she is to step down from the social media company.
Ms Yaccarino did not give a reason behind her decision.
'When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company,' she wrote on the platform.
'I'm immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App,' she wrote and that she would continue 'cheering' for the staffers who remain at X after her resignation.
On Tuesday, the Grok chatbot made headlines when it started to answer user prompts with offensive comments.
Its comments became so offensive that a court in Turkey temporarily blocked access to Grok.
Users had reported that Grok began to insult President Tayyip Erdogan, as well as the country's religious values.
Other users accused Grok of also giving anti-Semitic answers to prompts. It also praised Adolf Hitler at one point.
The offensive posts gave more reasons for critics of Mr Musk to question his leadership of the company.
In recent years, he had posted several comments that many deemed anti-Semitic, racist and bigoted.
Mercurial technology tycoon and entrepreneur Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022, appointed Ms Yaccarino as chief executive in 2023.
His decision stemmed from a series of decisions revolving around content moderation that alienated some users and prompted a mass exodus of advertisers.
At the time she was named chief executive, many analysts believed Ms Yaccarino would play good cop to Mr Musk's bad cop, and help to shore up the advertising side of X's business.
Mr Musk's fervent and significant financial support of Donald Trump often hindered her efforts, with X struggling amid a mass exit of users and an increase in rival platforms Threads and BlueSky.
Convincing companies to continue to advertise on X, also proved to be an uphill battle.
X later merged with Mr Musk's artificial intelligence endeavour, xAI.
Many wondered if the move was made to help bolster the financial stability of both entities.
Regardless, the merger provided greater integration of xAI's Grok chatbot into the X social media platform overall.
Shortly after Mr Trump won the 2024 election, Mr Musk gave what many considered to be a Nazi salute in front of Mr Trump's supporters during a rally.
'We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,' read a post from the main Grok account on X. '
'Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,' the post continued, stopping short of elaborating on what caused the chatbot to suddenly provide offensive answers.
X later said that it was working to 'quickly identify' and update the Grok language model to prevent further problems.
Mr Musk didn't directly address the issue, which lasted several hours, only cryptically posting a message about it.
'Never a dull moment on this platform,' he wrote.
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