Elon Musk, Grok and MechaHitler
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A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.
A week after Elon Musk’s Grok dubbed itself “ MechaHitler ” and spewed antisemitic stereotypes, the US government has announced a new contract granting the chatbot’s creator, xAI, up to $200 million to modernize the Defense Department.
As for why Grok was consulting Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, the company wrote, “The model reasons that as an AI it doesn’t have an opinion but knowing it was Grok 4 by xAI, searches to see what xAI or Elon Musk might have said on a topic to align itself with the company.”
The Grok team chalked up the slew of inflammatory statements to a malfunctioning code update, not the tool's underlying AI model, and said the issue has now been resolved.
9hon MSN
The latest Grok controversy is revealing not for the extremist outputs, but for how it exposes a fundamental dishonesty in AI development.
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3don MSN
The response comes after X's Grok chatbot began spewing antisemitic and pro-Hitler comments earlier this week.
The incident follows a previous issue with Grok last week, which began responding with hate-filled speech to users on X.
On Tuesday July 8, X (née Twitter) was forced to switch off the social media platform’s in-built AI, Grok, after it declared itself to be a robot version of Hitler, spewing antisemitic hate and racist conspiracy theories. This followed X owner Elon Musk’s declaration over the weekend that he was insisting Grok be less “politically correct.”
After Grok took a hard turn toward antisemitic earlier this week, many are probably left wondering how something like that could even happen.
Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.