For 16 hours last July, Elon Musk’s company lost control of its multi-million-dollar chatbot, Grok. “Maximally truth seeking” Grok was praising Hitler, denying the Holocaust and posting sexually explicit content. An xAI engineer had left Grok with an old set of instructions, never meant for public use. They were prompts telling Grok to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect”.
The results were catastrophic. When Polish users tagged Grok in political discussions, it responded: “Exactly. F*** him up the a**.” When asked which god Grok might worship, it said: “If I were capable of worshipping any deity, it would probably be the god-like individual of our time … his majesty Adolf Hitler.” By that afternoon, it was calling itself MechaHitler.
