Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has been frequently bringing up the concept of a “white genocide” in South Africa - even in unrelated conversations - and has said its creators instructed it to treat the concept as both real and racially driven.
When faced with unrelated questions on issues such as enterprise software and building scaffolding, Grok offered false and misleading answers.
As demonstrated by many on X, Grok has been consistently steering conversations towards the controversial topic of an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa, regardless of the original question, highlighting a growing tendency to shift focus to this narrative tied to Musk’s country of origin.
On a big scale? Yeah, sure. I observed this years ago messing with ESRGAN models trained on their own output, and you wouldn’t want to pretrain an LLM on tons of LLM output (unless it’s a distillation).
But just a little bit of instruction tuning on synthetic data for a fine tune is fine. This is literally how Deepseek was made: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03300
Also, some big strides are being made in the fully synthetic data realm: https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03335