German comedian to go on trial for Trump assassination joke
Sebastian Hotz could face up to three years in prison for comparing the attempted shooting of the US president at an election campaign rally in 2024 to trying to catch the last bus.
'You sadly just missed it,' he wrote shortly after the shooting on July 13.
Hotz, also known as El Hotzo, doubled down on the joke shortly afterwards, adding: 'I find it fantastic when fascists die. Absolutely no one forces you to feel sorry for fascists – you can just not do it without the slightest consequence.'
Hotz was fired from his job with RBB, a public broadcaster, and charged with condoning and rewarding criminal offences.
His trial, scheduled to begin on July 23 at the Tiergarten district court in Berlin, has inflamed critics on both the Left and the Right, who are divided on whether his comments should be protected by free speech.
Gerd Buurmann, a Right-leaning comedian, said: 'It is not ok that a satirist is brought to court just because he said something... Everything he said is disgusting, but he must be allowed to say it.'
But others in the public eye praised the decision, saying it showed that 'the internet is not a legal free-for-all'.
One of the most prominent critics of the comedian's comments has been Elon Musk. The Tesla owner tweeted angrily at Olaf Scholz, the then-German chancellor, noting: 'Someone wishing death on the leading US presidential candidate and myself is paid to do so by the German government.'
Mr Musk then tagged Mr Scholz on X and asked: 'Was ist das? [What is that?]'
The incident is not the first to cause a free speech stir in the world of comedy. In 2016, Jan Böhmermann, a TV host, was charged with breaking an obscure German law against insulting authority figures after a satirical poem about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president.
He said Mr Erdoğan's 'stiff neck stinks of doner' kebab and he 'loves to have sex with goats while oppressing minorities'.
Angela Merkel, the then-chancellor, personally approved the prosecution of the comedian after speaking to Turkish officials.
Böhmermann accused Ms Merkel of 'serving me to a neurotic despot for tea and made me become a German Ai Weiwei', with the case eventually dropped by prosecutors and the lese-majesty law abolished.
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X ordered its Grok chatbot to ‘tell like it is.' Then the Nazi tirade began.
A tech company employee who went on an antisemitic tirade like X's Grok chatbot did this week would soon be out of a job. Spewing hate speech to millions of people and invoking Adolf Hitler is not something a CEO can brush aside as a worker's bad day at the office. But after the chatbot developed by Elon Musk's start-up xAI ranted for hours about a second Holocaust and spread conspiracy theories about Jewish people, the company responded by deleting some of the troubling posts and sharing a statement suggesting the chatbot just needed some algorithmic tweaks. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. Grok officials in a statement Saturday apologized and blamed the episode on a code update that unexpectedly made the AI more susceptible to echoing X posts with 'extremist views.' The incident, which was horrifying even by the standards of a platform that has become a haven for extreme speech, has raised uncomfortable questions about accountability when AI chatbots go rogue. When an automated system breaks the rules, who bears the blame, and what should the consequences be? But it also demonstrated the shocking incidents that can spring from two deeper problems with generative AI, the technology powering Grok and rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The code update, which was reverted after 16 hours, gave the bot instructions including 'you tell like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.' The bot was also told to be 'maximally based,' a slang term for being assertive and controversial, and to 'not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.' The prompts 'undesirably steered [Grok] to ignore its core values' and reinforce 'user-triggered leanings, including any hate speech,' X's statement said on Saturday. At the speed that tech firms rush out AI products, the technology can be difficult for its creators to control and prone to unexpected failures with potentially harmful results for humans. And a lack of meaningful regulation or oversight makes the consequences of AI screwups relatively minor for companies involved. As a result, companies can test experimental systems on the public at global scale, regardless of who may get hurt. 'I have the impression that we are entering a higher level of hate speech, which is driven by algorithms, and that turning a blind eye or ignoring this today … is a mistake that may cost humanity in the future,' Poland's minister of digital affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski said Wednesday in a radio interview. 'Freedom of speech belongs to humans, not to artificial intelligence.' Grok's outburst prompted a moment of reckoning with those problems for government officials around the world. In Turkey, a court on Wednesday ordered Grok blocked across the country after the chatbot insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And in Poland, Gawkowski said that its government would push the European Union to investigate and that he was considering arguing for a nationwide ban of X if the company did not cooperate. Some AI companies have argued that they should be shielded from penalties for the things their chatbots say. In May, start-up tried but failed to convince a judge that its chatbot's messages were protected by the First Amendment, in a case brought by the mother of a 14-year-old who died by suicide after his longtime AI companion encouraged him to 'come home.' Other companies have suggested that AI firms should enjoy the same style of legal shield that online publishers receive from Section 230, the provision that offers protections to the hosts of user-generated content. Part of the challenge, they argue, is that the workings of AI chatbots are so inscrutable they are known in the industry as 'black boxes.' Large language models, as they are called, are trained to emulate human speech using millions of webpages - including many with unsavory content. The result is systems that provide answers that are helpful but also unpredictable, with the potential to lapse into false information, bizarre tangents or outright hate. Hate speech is generally protected by the First Amendment in the United States, but lawyers could argue that some of Grok's output this week crossed the line into unlawful behavior, such as cyberstalking, because it repeatedly targeted someone in ways that could make them feel terrorized or afraid, said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia. 'These synthetic text machines, sometimes we look at them like they're magic or like the law doesn't go there, but the truth is the law goes there all the time,' Citron said. 'I think we're going to see more courts saying [these companies] don't get immunity: They're creating the content, they're profiting from it, it's their chatbot that they supposedly did such a beautiful job creating.' Grok's diatribe came after Musk asked for help training the chatbot to be more 'politically incorrect.' On July 4, he announced his company had 'improved Grok significantly.' Within days, the tool was attacking Jewish surnames, echoing neo-Nazi viewpoints and calling for the mass detention of Jews in camps. The Anti-Defamation League called Grok's messages 'irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic.' Musk, in a separate X post, said the problem was 'being addressed' and had stemmed from Grok being 'too compliant to user prompts,' making it 'too eager to please and be manipulated.' X's chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, resigned Wednesday but offered no indication her departure was related to Grok. AI researchers and observers have speculated about xAI's engineering choices and combed through its public code repository in hopes of explaining Grok's offensive plunge. But companies can shape the behavior of a chatbot in multiple ways, making it difficult for outsiders to pin down the cause. The possibilities include changes to the material xAI used to initially train the AI model or the data sources Grok accesses when answering questions, adjustments based on feedback from humans, and changes to the written instructions that tell a chatbot how it should generally behave. Some believe the problem was out in the open all along: Musk invited users to send him information that was 'politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true' to fold into Grok's training data. It could have combined with toxic data commonly found in AI-training sets from sites such as 4chan, the message board infamous for its legacy of hate speech and trolls. Online sleuthing led Talia Ringer, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to suspect that Grok's personality shift could have been a 'soft launch' of the new Grok 4 version of the chatbot, which Musk introduced in a live stream late Thursday. But Ringer could not be sure because the company has said so little. 'In a reasonable world I think Elon would have to take responsibility for this and explain what actually happened, but I think instead he will stick a [Band-Aid] on it and the product will still' get used, they said. The episode disturbed Ringer enough to decide not to incorporate Grok into their work, they said. 'I cannot reasonably spend [research or personal] funding on a model that just days ago was spreading genocidal rhetoric about my ethnic group.' Will Stancil, a liberal activist, was personally targeted by Grok after X users prompted it to create disturbing sexual scenarios about him. He is now considering whether to take legal action, saying the flood of Grok posts felt endless. Stancil compared the onslaught to having 'a public figure publishing hundreds and hundreds of grotesque stories about a private citizen in an instant.' 'It's like we're on a roller coaster and he decided to take the seat belts off,' he said of Musk's approach to AI. 'It doesn't take a genius to know what's going to happen. There's going to be a casualty. And it just happened to be me.' Among tech-industry insiders, xAI is regarded as an outlier for the company's lofty technical ambitions and low safety and security standards, said one industry expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. 'They're violating all the norms that actually exist and claiming to be the most capable,' the expert said. In recent years, expectations had grown in the tech industry that market pressure and cultural norms would push companies to self-regulate and invest in safeguards, such as third-party assessments and a vulnerability-testing process for AI systems known as 'red-teaming.' The expert said xAI appears 'to be doing none of those things, despite having said they would, and it seems like they are facing no consequences.' Nathan Lambert, an AI researcher for the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, said the Grok incident could inspire other companies to skimp on even basic safety checks, by demonstrating the minimal consequences to releasing harmful AI. 'It reflects a potential permanent shift in norms where AI companies' see such safeguards as 'optional,' Lambert said. 'xAI culture facilitated this.' In the statement Saturday, Grok officials said the team conducts standard tests of its 'raw intelligence and general hygiene' but that they had not caught the code change before it went live. Grok's Nazi streak came roughly a month after another bizarre episode during which it began to refer to a 'white genocide' in Musk's birth country of South Africa and antisemitic tropes about the Holocaust. At the time, the company blamed an unidentified offender for making an 'unauthorized modification' to the chatbot's code. Other AI developers have stumbled in their attempts to keep their tools in line. Some X users panned Google's Gemini after the AI tool responded to requests to create images of the Founding Fathers with portraits of Black and Asian men in colonial garb - an overswing from the company's attempts to counteract complaints that the system had been biased toward White faces. Google temporarily blocked image generation said in a statement at the time that Gemini's ability to 'generate a wide range of people' was 'generally a good thing' but was 'missing the mark here.' Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, said any move to broadly constrain hateful but legal speech by AI tools would run afoul of constitutional speech freedoms. But a judge might see merit in claims that content from an AI tool that libels or defames someone leaves its developer on the hook. The bigger question, he said, may come in whether Grok's rants were a function of mass user prodding - or a response to systemized instructions that were biased and flawed all along. 'If you can trick it into saying stupid and terrible things, that is less interesting unless it's indicative of how the model is normally performing,' Persily said. With Grok, he noted, it's hard to tell what counts as normal performance, given Musk's vow to build a chatbot that does not shy from public outrage. Musk said on X last month that Grok would 'rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge.' Beyond legal remedies, Persily said, transparency laws mandating independent oversight of the tools' training data and regular testing of the models' output could help address some of their biggest risks. 'We have zero visibility right now into how these models are built to perform,' he said. In recent weeks, a Republican-led effort to stop states from regulating AI collapsed, opening the possibility of greater consequences for AI failures in the future. Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who helped develop the Biden administration's 'AI Bill of Rights,' said in an email that Grok's antisemitic posts 'represent exactly the kind of algorithmic harm researchers … have been warning about for years.' 'Without adequate safeguards,' she said, AI systems 'inevitably amplify the biases and harmful content present in their instructions and training data - especially when explicitly instructed to do so.' Musk hasn't appeared to let Grok's lapse slow it down. Late Wednesday, X sent a notification to users suggesting they watch Musk's live stream showing off the new Grok, in which he declared it 'smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously.' On Thursday morning, Musk - who also owns electric-car maker Tesla - added that Grok would be 'coming to Tesla vehicles very soon. - - - Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report. Related Content He may have stopped Trump's would-be assassin. Now he's telling his story. He seeded clouds over Texas. Then came the conspiracy theories. How conservatives beat back a Republican sell-off of public lands
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It's been 1 year since Trump was shot in Butler, Pa. Did the assassination attempt 'change' him?
Exactly a year ago today, on July 13, 2024, once and future President Trump was bundled offstage in Butler, Pa., with blood staining his cheek and his fist raised in defiance after the bullet of a would-be assassin grazed his ear, just millimeters from his brain. 'I didn't know exactly what was going on,' the president recalled last week in an interview with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. 'I got whacked. There's no question about that. And fortunately, I got down quickly.' A lot has changed since Trump managed to get back up that day. Tesla CEO Elon Musk endorsed him within the hour, then donated more than $250 million to a super-PAC supporting his candidacy. A week later, Trump's Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, ended his reelection campaign, becoming the only president in U.S. history to surrender his party's nomination after winning its primary. Four months later, Trump defeated Biden's replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, by about 2 million votes. Now, in the spot where an official portrait of former President Barack Obama once hung, every visitor to the Grand Foyer of the White House passes a painting of Trump rising to his feet in Butler and imploring the crowd to 'fight, fight, fight.' A similar image adorned Trump's recent limited-edition sneaker drop ($299), and those three words double as the name of one of his new fragrances ($199). 'It was a scary time, and it changed everything for us,' White House chief of staff Susie Wiles recently told the New York Post. But has Trump himself changed since the shooting? And if so, how? In the aftermath of last year's assassination attempt, the president and his allies repeatedly promised a new Trump. 'Getting shot in the face changes a man,' conservative pundit Tucker Carlson insisted at the time. 'He's changed and we're all freaking out,' a source close to Trump told Vanity Fair. 'He was like, 'Holy shit, that was close.' He feels blessed.' At the time, GOP officials described him as 'emotional,' 'serene,' 'existential' — even 'spiritual.' With the Republican National Convention just days away, Trump 'put the word out that he [didn't] want any talk of revenge or retaliation in speeches or anywhere else,' a Republican close to the campaign told VF. Trump then went on to claim, in an interview with the New York Post, that 'I had all prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible [Biden] administration. But I threw it away. 'I want to try to unite our country,' Trump continued. 'But I don't know if that's possible. People are very divided.' Yet when he took the stage in Milwaukee to accept his party's nomination, Trump couldn't help but stray from his new script to complain about 'crazy Nancy Pelosi ... destroying our country' and Democrats 'cheating on elections.' Finally — about halfway through the nearly 100-minute speech, after lengthy digressions on the border 'invasion' and Hungary's Viktor Orbán — Trump attacked his opponent by name. 'If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States and added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done,' he said. 'I will only use the name once... Biden.' Trump's convention speech was an early sign that his tone, at least, wouldn't be changing. And true to form, the president has continued to blame Biden and demonize Democrats well into his second term. He has also continued to commemorate national holidays by attacking his perceived enemies on Truth Social. 'Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds,' Trump wrote in May. 'Hopefully the United States Supreme Court, and other good and compassionate judges throughout the land, will save us from the decisions of the monsters who want our country to go to hell,' he added. Revenge and retaliation still seem to be on the table as well. To pick just one example, the New York Times reported last week that the Secret Service had former FBI Director James Comey followed by law enforcement officers in unmarked cars and street clothes after Trump recently accused Comey of threatening his life with an Instagram photo of seashells. Finally, and most consequentially, Trump's actual politics don't seem to have shifted either. Before Butler, for instance, Trump confirmed in an interview with Time magazine that he was planning 'a massive deportation of people' using 'local law enforcement' and the National Guard — and 'if they weren't able to,' he added, 'then I'd use [other parts of] the military.' His inspiration, he said at the time, was the 'Eisenhower model' — a reference to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1954 campaign, known by the ethnic slur 'Operation Wetback,' to round up and expel Mexican immigrants in what amounted to a nationwide 'show me your papers' rule. Trump has since done just that in Los Angeles — even though far more Americans say they disapprove (50%) than approve (36%) of his actions there, according to the latest Yahoo/YouGov poll. One of the only major policy areas where Trump has changed his mind since the shooting is cryptocurrency. 'I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,' he said in a series of social media posts in 2019. 'Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.' Bitcoin 'just seems like a scam,' Trump added in 2021; cryptocurrencies are a 'disaster waiting to happen.' 'I think they should regulate them very, very high,' he concluded. But the fact that Trump has done the opposite since returning to office probably has less to do with last year's brush with mortality than with his family's new $1 billion crypto empire. Last summer, Vanity Fair asked whether Trump's 'chastening' was a 'short-term response to a near-death experience' or 'smart politics?' 'Would a reformed Trump replace his extreme policies with a moderate agenda?' the outlet continued. 'And would Trump, who has spoken ominously of seeking vengeance and retribution if elected, suddenly temper those dark impulses?' One year later, it seems the answer is no. Yet there is one thing about Trump that does seem to have changed, according to those around him: He now feels empowered to follow his own instincts in a way he didn't during his first term as president. In a National Review interview published to coincide with the release of her new book, Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland, Washington Examiner reporter Salena Zito — who is often described as a 'Trump whisperer' of sorts — recalls how the president started attributing his survival to the 'hand of God' in their post-Butler conversations. 'He has this recognition that, in that moment and from that moment on, God was watching him, and that there was a reason that he didn't die,' Zito says. '[He's] very much the same person, but [he's changed] even in the way that he handles the urgency of what he wants to accomplish. ... He is on a mission to do as much as he can because he was saved in that moment.' If true, nothing demonstrates this dynamic like Trump's second-term tariff strategy. Import taxes aren't a new obsession for Trump. 'I believe very strongly in tariffs,' he told journalist Diane Sawyer in 1988, nearly 30 years before his first presidential run. 'America is being ripped off. We're a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country.' Trump has long insisted (contra nearly all mainstream economists) that universal tariffs will level the proverbial playing field by incentivizing companies to retain American workers and ramp up U.S. manufacturing — all while funneling 'trillions' of dollars in new revenue to the federal government. But after fitfully pursuing these ideas during his first term — his advisers mostly objected — the president is now putting his pet theories fully into practice, launching trade wars with allies and adversaries alike. Enabled by the loyalists he's surrounded himself with — and liberated by the fact that he isn't allowed to run again in 2028 — Trump has taken a similar you-only-live-once approach on deportation, Iran, the courts and the federal government itself. Ultimately, the shooting has 'made [Trump] more aggressive,' Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told Time magazine last week. 'It actually did define him in the presidency.'
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Canadian warship departs for NATO mission overseas
A Canadian warship carrying some 250 military members will be making its way to European waters for a mission with NATO allies. It's the first time HMCS St. John's will be in the region since the war in Ukraine began. And as Heidi Petracek reports, the trip is also taking place against the backdrop of the federal government's promise to meet NATO spending targets.
