Elon Musk’s xAI tries to explain Grok’s South African race relations freakout the other day

If you asked the Grok AI chatbot built into Elon Musk’s social network X a question yesterday — something innocuous, like why enterprise software is hard to replace — you may have gotten an unsolicited message about claims of “white genocide” in South Africa (largely lacking evidence) due to attacks on farmers and the song “Kill the Boer.”

Not exactly on-brand for a chatbot built around a “maximally truth seeking” large language model (LLM) of the same name. The unexpected tangent wasn’t a bug, exactly, but it wasn’t a feature either.

Grok’s creators at Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI just posted an update on X (which xAI now owns) attempting to explain what happened with this odd and politically, racially charged behavior, though it’s far from precise on the culprit or the actual technical details of what occurred.

As the official xAI company account posted:

We ...