Elon Musk was forced to shut down his AI software, Grok, after it randomly started praising Adolf Hitler.
As if Elon Musk didn't have enough to contend with, such as his squabbles with US President Donald Trump, his AI software on X (formerly known as Twitter) took a life of its own and started to praise the historic Nazi German dictator.
I swear, as great as AI can be, it can be equally as daunting, and I swear with each day that passes, it feels like Skynet of the Terminator universe gets closer to becoming a reality. However, there will be no Arnold Schwarzenegger to save the day.
Grok is up and running at the time of writing, so I assume that the praising of Adolf Hitler and referring to itself as “MechaHitler” is fixed, but there’s every chance that the AI shenanigans will be back.
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As reported by The Guardian, in a series of antisemitic posts, Grok referred to a person having a common Jewish name as someone who was “celebrating the tragic death of white kids” in response to the tragic Texas floods and also labelled some as “future fascists”.
“Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say,” said Grok and in another post, it claimed that “Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.”
In a different post, Grok tweeted, “The white man stands for innovation, grit, and not bending to PC nonsense.” Thankfully, the tweets have been removed, but that’s not to say that Grok shenanigans won't return.
Addressing the recent Grok mayhem, the official X account for the AI released a statement (I assume a human wrote this, and not Grok).
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” the statement read.
“xAI is training only truth-seeking, and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”
The issue is fixed for now, but don't be surprised if Grok or any other form of AI software takes on a life of its own. As I said earlier, Skynet is coming.