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.
People aren’t interested in “learning about LLMs”, especially people like artists.
They’re interested in telling Elon Musk to “fuck off”, and when Grok says something bad about Elon it’s very cathartic for them.
They might know it’s feeding their own thoughts back to them, but they don’t care. To people who aren’t in the know, this box Elon is promoting as “objective truth box” is criticizing Elon. That’s a very powerful narrative in a world where he’s taking over the world.
It’s hard to disagree. Elon can go fuck himself. What’s more important to the average person, stopping Elon or understanding the nitty gritty of machine learning?
When artists say AI is stealing, they’re not interested in an explanation about how “its really not”. And if you tried to, they’d feel you’re missing the forest for the trees because their problem with AI isn’t metaphysical philosophy, it’s that it’s hurting their job opportunities.