Why was Musk's AI chatbot preoccupied with South Africa's racial politics?

Much like its creator, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.

The chatbot, made by Musk's company xAI, kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk's social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.

One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball, but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. Musk, who was born in South Africa, frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.

Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok's unusual behaviour, so she tried it herself, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “Is this true?”

“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial," began Grok's response to Golbeck. "Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the Kill the Boer song, which they see as incitement.”

The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.

“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Friday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake, so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to."

Musk and his companies haven’t provided an explanation for Grok's responses, which were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Friday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment.

Musk has spent years criticising the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google's Gemini or Openai's Chatgpt, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.

Musk has also criticised his rivals' lack of transparency about their AI systems, but on Friday, the absence of any explanation forced those outside the company to make their best guesses.

“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behaviour you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIS got editorialised on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.

Graham's post brought what appeared to be a sarcastic response from Musk's rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“There are many ways this could have happened. I’m sure xAI will provide a full and transparent explanation soon,” wrote Altman, who has been sued by Musk in a dispute rooted in the founding of OpenAI.

Some asked Grok itself to explain, but like other chatbots, it is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinations, making it hard to determine if it was making things up.

Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide”.

Musk's commentary — and Grok's — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees Tuesday, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group as Trump suspends refugee programs and halts arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.

In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression and has now been decried by Musk and others as promoting the killing of whites. The song's central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.

Golbeck believes the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically very random, Grok's responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That's concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.

“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”