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On Tuesday, Grok, the AI-chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, began generating vile, bigoted and antisemitic responses to X users’ questions, referring to itself as “MechaHitler,” praising Hitler and “the white man,” and, as a weird side-quest, making intensely critical remarks in both Turkish and English about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The melee followed a July 4 update to Grok’s default prompts, which Musk characterized at the time as having “improved Grok significantly,” tweeting that “You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions.”

There was a difference indeed: besides the antisemitism and the Erdogan stuff, Grok responded to X users’ questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. (Stancil has indicated he may sue X.) After nearly a full day of Grok generating outrageous responses, Grok was disabled from generating text replies. Grok’s own X account said that xAI had “taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.” Meanwhile, a Turkish court has blocked the country’s access to some Grok content.

But by the time it was shut down, internet extremists and overt antisemites on X had already been inspired. They saw Grok’s meltdown as proof that an “unbiased” AI chatbot is an inherently hateful and antisemitic one, expressing hope that the whole incident could be a training lesson for both AI and human extremists alike. Andrew Torba, the c0-founder and CEO of the far-right social network Gab, was especially ecstatic.

“Incredible things are happening,” he tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, sharing screenshots of two antisemitic Grok posts. Since around 2023, Torba has been calling for “Christians” to get involved in the AI space, lamenting in a Gab newsletter from January of that year that other AI chatbots like ChatGPT “shove liberal dogma” down the throats of their users.

JohnH wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 9:19 am I mean, wouldn’t any reasonable person also be critical of Erdogan?

Szdfan wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 10:30 am

JohnH wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 9:19 am I mean, wouldn’t any reasonable person also be critical of Erdogan?

Genocidal MechaHitler agrees: the real issue here is criticism of Erdogan, not the part where the AI turned into a Nazi fanfic generator.

It’s like finding a single coherent sentence in a demon’s blood-soaked manifesto and going, “Well, he does make a good point about zoning laws.”

JohnH wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 10:34 am

Szdfan wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 10:30 am

JohnH wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 9:19 am I mean, wouldn’t any reasonable person also be critical of Erdogan?

Genocidal MechaHitler agrees: the real issue here is criticism of Erdogan, not the part where the AI turned into a Nazi fanfic generator.

It’s like finding a single coherent sentence in a demon’s blood-soaked manifesto and going, “Well, he does make a good point about zoning laws.”

I just happened to notice that was slipped in there as if it were somehow a bad thing or wrong (along with criticism of Ataturk). If you want to talk about a "blood-soaked manifesto", then perhaps it would be worthwhile to focus on the Armenian genocide conducted by Turkey (or, more specifically, architected and executed by Ataturk), and then raise the question of why this article acted like criticism of Ataturk and Erdogan is a bad thing.

Comparing a computer program to a "demon's blood-soaked manifesto" is absurd. Computer programs that generate text aren't demons and don't kill anyone. People like Ataturk, on the other hand, have killed millions, and they did so without the help of AI.

The real question is why AIs have been programmed not to criticise people like him.

Soloist wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 11:08 am AI really is a misnomer anyway. Large language models produce what you feed them.
This simply just expresses the bias of the developer

Ken wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 11:11 am What really seems to be happening is that Elon is desperately trying to fine-tune the dial on Grok to make it more conservative since actual facts tend to have a "liberal bias" on a lot of pet conservative issues from climate change to vaccines. Yet every time he does so it veers right off the road into a cesspool of fascist neo-Nazi nonsense. Earlier it was "white genocide" in South Africa. Now this.

What is funny is how all of Elon's racist followers keep jumping up and down and cheerleading the effort. Which kind of gives away the game.

JohnH wrote: ↑Thu Jul 10, 2025 11:40 am In short, LLMs trained on societally-acceptable datasets result in an LLM that produces text that would be offensive to many people. Trying to claim this is about Elon Musk or xAI or X is just revealing someone's own bias.