Musk turns Grok into a 'politically incorrect' AI chatbot
What's the story
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has given its chatbot, Grok, a major update. The new instructions tell Grok to "assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased" and "not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect." This is part of Musk's ongoing effort to influence the bot's perspective. The update was announced by Musk on Friday and came into effect over the weekend.
Instructional changes
'Response should not shy away from making politically incorrect claims'
The latest update includes new lines in Grok's system prompts, which guide its responses. One of these instructions says, "If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties." It also says that "the response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated."
Controversial claims
Grok made controversial claims after update
Grok has made some controversial claims since the update. The chatbot blamed Musk for contributing to Texas flood-related deaths and echoed anti-Semitic tropes about Hollywood. In February, xAI had to patch Grok after it said Musk and Trump deserved the death penalty. Two days later, another patch was added to stop it from saying they spread misinformation.
Future developments
Musk has been trying to tweak Grok's behavior
Musk has been at odds with Grok in recent months. In June, he criticized the bot for "parroting legacy media" after it claimed right-wing political violence was more common than left-wing. He then announced plans to launch a version of Grok that would "rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors." This new version would ask users to contribute statements that are "politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true."
Company statement
xAI issued public statement after Holocaust post
After Grok went viral for saying it was "skeptical" of Holocaust death tolls, xAI issued a public statement. The company said someone had altered the AI bot's system prompt in a way that "violated xAI's internal policies and core values." Following this incident, the company started publicly publishing Grok's system prompts on GitHub.