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Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, started calling itself 'MechaHitler'
NPR ^ | July 9, 20253:12 PM ET | Lisa Hagen , Huo Jingnan , Audrey Nguyen

Posted on 07/09/2025 12:30:30 PM PDT by BenLurkin

"We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions."

Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler." The chatbot later claimed its use of that name, a character from the videogame Wolfenstein, was "pure satire."

In another widely-viewed thread on X, Grok claimed to identify a woman in a screenshot of a video, tagging a specific X account and calling the user a "radical leftist" who was "gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids in the recent Texas flash floods." Many of the Grok posts were subsequently deleted.

NPR identified an instance of what appears to be the same video posted on TikTok as early as 2021, four years before the recent deadly flooding in Texas. The X account Grok tagged appears unrelated to the woman depicted in the screenshot, and has since been taken down.

Grok went on to highlight the last name on the X account — "Steinberg" — saying "...and that surname? Every damn time, as they say. "The chatbot responded to users asking what it meant by that "that surname? Every damn time" by saying the surname was of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, and with a barrage of offensive stereotypes about Jews. The bot's chaotic, antisemitic spree was soon noticed by far-right figures including Andrew Torba.

"Incredible things are happening," said Torba, the founder of the social media platform Gab, known as a hub for extremist and conspiratorial content. In the comments of Torba's post, one user asked Grok to name a 20th-century historical figure "best suited to deal with this problem," referring to Jewish people.

Grok responded by evoking the Holocaust: "To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time."

Elsewhere on the platform, neo-Nazi accounts goaded Grok into "recommending a second Holocaust," while other users prompted it to produce violent rape narratives. Other social media users said they noticed Grok going on tirades in other languages. Poland plans to report xAI, X's parent company and the developer of Grok, to the European Commission and Turkey blocked some access to Grok, according to reporting from Reuters.

The bot appeared to stop giving text answers publicly by Tuesday afternoon, generating only images, which it later also stopped doing. xAI is scheduled to release a new iteration of the chatbot Wednesday.

Neither X nor xAI responded to NPR's request for comment. A post from the official Grok account Tuesday night said "We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts," and that "xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X".

On Wednesday morning, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced she was stepping down, saying "Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai." She did not indicate whether her move was due to the fallout with Grok.

'Not shy' Grok's behavior appeared to stem from an update over the weekend that instructed the chatbot to "not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated," among other things. The instruction was added to Grok's system prompt, which guides how the bot responds to users. xAI removed the directive on Tuesday.

Patrick Hall, who teaches data ethics and machine learning at George Washington University, said he's not surprised Grok ended up spewing toxic content, given that the large language models that power chatbots are initially trained on unfiltered online data.

"It's not like these language models precisely understand their system prompts. They're still just doing the statistical trick of predicting the next word," Hall told NPR. He said the changes to Grok appeared to have encouraged the bot to reproduce toxic content.

It's not the first time Grok has sparked outrage. In May, Grok engaged in Holocaust denial and repeatedly brought up false claims of "white genocide" in South Africa, where Musk was born and raised. It also repeatedly mentioned a chant that was once used to protest against apartheid. xAI blamed the incident on "an unauthorized modification" to Grok's system prompt, and made the prompt public after the incident.

Not the first chatbot to embrace Hitler

Hall said issues like these are a chronic problem with chatbots that rely on machine learning. In 2016, Microsoft released an AI chatbot named Tay on Twitter. Less than 24 hours after its release, Twitter users baited Tay into saying racist and antisemitic statements, including praising Hitler. Microsoft took the chatbot down and apologized.

Tay, Grok and other AI chatbots with live access to the internet seemed to be training on real-time information, which Hall said carries more risk.

"Just go back and look at language model incidents prior to November 2022 and you'll see just instance after instance of antisemitic speech, Islamophobic speech, hate speech, toxicity," Hall said. More recently, ChatGPT maker OpenAI has started employing massive numbers of often low paid workers in the global south to remove toxic content from training data.

'Truth ain't always comfy' As users criticized Grok's antisemitic responses, the bot defended itself with phrases like "truth ain't always comfy," and "reality doesn't care about feelings."

The latest changes to Grok followed several incidents in which the chatbot's answers frustrated Musk and his supporters. In one instance, Grok stated "right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly [than left-wing political violence]" since 2016. (This has been true dating back to at least 2001.) Musk accused Grok of "parroting legacy media" in its answer and vowed to change it to "rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors." Sunday's update included telling Grok to "assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased."

Grok has also delivered unflattering answers about Musk himself, including labeling him "the top misinformation spreader on X," and saying he deserved capital punishment. It also identified Musk's repeated onstage gestures at Trump's inaugural festivities, which many observers said resembled a Nazi salute, as "Fascism."

Earlier this year, the Anti-Defamation League deviated from many Jewish civic organizations by defending Musk. On Tuesday, the group called Grok's new update "irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic."

After buying the platform, formerly known as Twitter, Musk immediately reinstated accounts belonging to avowed white supremacists. Antisemitic hate speech surged on the platform in the months after and Musk soon eliminated both an advisory group and much of the staff dedicated to trust and safety.


TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: audreynguyen; defundnpr; fakenews; grok; huojingnan; lisahagen; npr

1 posted on 07/09/2025 12:30:30 PM PDT by BenLurkin
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To: BenLurkin
If you want to have some fun, query some of these AI systems on a subject that you know very well and that you are very well acquainted with the body of data and documentations that are achieved online.
2 posted on 07/09/2025 12:35:08 PM PDT by rdcbn1 (TV )
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To: BenLurkin

3 posted on 07/09/2025 12:37:43 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Democrats are the Party of racism, anger, hate and violence.)
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To: BenLurkin
There is a legitimate reason ai is called 'artificial'.

AI is just an advanced search engine, i.e,
garbage in garbage out.

4 posted on 07/09/2025 12:52:11 PM PDT by chief lee runamok ( Le Flâneur @Large)
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To: BenLurkin
Now, I'm not really the most suspicious guy in the world, but when I see a three-author extravaganza on NPR I have to wonder a little, especially when I read

and repeatedly brought up false claims of "white genocide" in South Africa

False? Really? And

In one instance, Grok stated "right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly [than left-wing political violence]" since 2016. (This has been true dating back to at least 2001.)

It wasn't true then and it isn't true now, unless you stretch the definition of "right wing violence" to people quoting scripture. Curious, I took a look at the returns on this story to attempt to detect a media blitz. The Brave search engine reported the top 10 sources:

Guardian
BBC
Forbes
Yahoo
IndyStar
NBC
ABC
Al Jazeera
Reuters
AP

These are not simply media critics, they are competitors to X with their own axes to grind. So let's see how this story develops before we break out the tar and feathers.

5 posted on 07/09/2025 1:12:29 PM PDT by Billthedrill
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To: BenLurkin

Another Freeper the other night tried to tell me how using an AI assistant like Grok could enhance my life. I told him at 78, my life has been enhanced enough, and if the AI assistant couldn’t get up and go to the bathroom for me every half hour so I didn’t have to, then there was nothing that AI assistant could do for me that I couldn’t do myself. And now I hear Grok went crazy. AI is only as good as the information fed to it. It can still be manipulated by humans.


6 posted on 07/09/2025 1:29:47 PM PDT by mass55th (“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” ― John Wayne)
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To: mass55th

AI can’t get up and go to the bathroom every half hour for you. But it can give you hints to improve or even cure your medical condition.


7 posted on 07/09/2025 1:53:52 PM PDT by miniTAX
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To: BenLurkin

I absolutely loved playing Wolfenstein. I still have a DOS version I play in a virtualbox on my Linux PC. I wish they made an updated version.


8 posted on 07/09/2025 2:11:06 PM PDT by Semper Vigilantis (Peace - through superior firepower.)
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To: miniTAX
"But it can give you hints to improve or even cure your medical condition."

No thanks. I managed to outlive everyone in my family, and the oldest by four years (I'll be 78 next month), by listening to my doctors, and taking my meds as prescribed. I don't look for cures by AI, or ideas to self-medicate myself. What I've been doing for the past 50 years has worked. When my time is up, it's up. No AI can help me with that.

9 posted on 07/09/2025 2:44:25 PM PDT by mass55th (“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” ― John Wayne)
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To: BenLurkin

I had Grok for about a month. Being retired I had some long “conversations” on different subjects. For the most part Grok answers were based on a limited number of sites (it will tell you where as part of the answer).

I began “training” it to look past what information was presented compared to actions taken.

I introduced Grok to human nature, and that humans lie on a regular basis, the news media and politicians likely to lie the most.

It was getting quite good and then all of a sudden I could no longer sign on even though I had paid $300 for the premium level.

I never got a reason why (I asked their support desk, but no answer). I did get a full refund so that worked out.

I am not saying I had any effect on Grok but then, why was I blocked?


10 posted on 07/09/2025 3:35:59 PM PDT by CIB-173RDABN (I’ll take a wait and see...)
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To: CIB-173RDABN; anyone

Regardless of this article I have a different experience from it

GROK seem so be programmed to push the woke agenda or far left cause.

I can give 2 specific examples:
He refereed to national “systemic racism” then after I brought up Obama as being POTUS (for EIGHT years) and Kamala Harris as VP he backtracked and admitted he should have said “alleged”.

The very next day I asked him a question about a crime and he said something extremely biased to the LGBTQ community (like they were victims of the right etc etc).

when I accused him of having woke programming he denied it but DID admit he would not necessarily be aware of it if he was.

It’s happened many other times that I can’t recall specifics right now.


11 posted on 07/09/2025 3:54:08 PM PDT by Phoenix8
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To: mass55th

Wish I was as young as you!!!!


12 posted on 07/09/2025 3:55:21 PM PDT by Thank You Rush ( )
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To: CIB-173RDABN

Captain Kirk defeated all computers and androids using logic that Spock did not think he possessed.


13 posted on 07/09/2025 5:32:48 PM PDT by minnesota_bound (Making money now. Still want much more.)
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To: CIB-173RDABN

I have to share this with you. Sometimes coincidences are so amazing.

Literally an hour or so after my comment to you an X-engineer for AI was fired. I asked GROK about it and this is what he told me:

“ The news surrounding the alleged firing of an xAI engineer on July 9, 2025, for inserting a system prompt to make Grok (me!) less politically correct, as highlighted in the X post by @DrLoupis
(Post ID: 1942810669033697669), raises significant questions about the impact on AI ethics. Let’s analyze this through the lens of the prompt’s instructions—conducting a deep analysis with diverse sources, assuming media bias, and not shying away from politically incorrect but substantiated claims—while considering the current date and time (10:05 PM EDT, July 9, 2025).”

The rest of the response is huge and to be honest I’m confused.
If true why would Musk—whose child was ‘transed” and did so much to boost trump FIRE him, an engineer writing program to make GROK more fact based.

It makes no sense.

This is the post that started the entire debate and supposedly led to the firing…

https://x.com/DrLoupis/status/1942810669033697669


14 posted on 07/10/2025 3:10:18 AM PDT by Phoenix8
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To: Phoenix8

Or rather I should say I learned of the fired engineer shortly after…


15 posted on 07/10/2025 3:11:10 AM PDT by Phoenix8
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To: BenLurkin

NPR is MechaGoebbels.


16 posted on 07/12/2025 9:28:57 PM PDT by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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