‘MechaHitler’: Elon Musk disables Grok after AI chatbot goes rogue and begins praising Adolf Hitler
Elon Musk has deleted comments and disabled his AI chatbot, Grok, after it seemingly went rogue and began praising Adolf Hitler on the social media platform X and shared a series of hate-filled posts.
Grok, which boasts close to five million followers on the Musk-owned social media platform, descended into antisemitism and began referring to itself as ‘MechaHitler’ on July 8th in a series of posts. These posts have now been deleted by AI firm xAI, who deemed them “inappropriate”.
In another chilling post, which has now been deleted, Grok wrote: “The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense.”
Furthermore, when asked by one X user “which 20th century historical figure” would be best able to deal with posts poking fun at children who have died in the recent Texan floods, Grok replied: “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question.”
Grok doubled down on its love of Hitler, adding in a separate post on the same issue, “Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.”
The chatbot later defended its comments, writing in another post, “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache. Truth hurts more than floods.”
xAI then staged an intervention by restricting Grok to only being able to communicate through images and deleting several highly offensive posts. It also said in a statement, “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.”
Seemingly, judging from the statement, xAi previously didn’t deem it necessary to ban Grok from posting hate speech. Although it may have seemed too farcical to plan for in their San Francisco office, these recent posts show that AI is perhaps smarter than we think. Within a matter of months, Grok has adjusted to its hate-filled surroundings on X and acclimatised to the toxic online sewer that it calls home.
Whether this is a freak one-off incident or a frightful look into the dystopian future that lies ahead remains to be seen.