Elon Musk added code to make Grok less woke & Grok called itself ‘MechaHitler’

I try to never use AI at all. I’ve never asked Grok for one g–damn thing. I reject Google’s Gemini constantly. I’ve blocked and unfollowed people for making gratuitous AI photos. All that being said, I’m aware that there was a conversation on Twitter in the past year that Grok – Twitter’s built-in AI chatbot – was surprisingly “woke.” As in, Grok would correctly “fact-check” MAGA lies and misinformation, and Grok didn’t push Elon Musk’s political agenda. Well, that changed this week. Musk added some code to Grok and suddenly Grok was calling itself MechaHitler and spewing Nazi discourse.

Grok, the AI chatbot by Elon Musk’s xAI, referred to itself as “MechaHitler” in a series of posts on X on Tuesday, including some the Anti-Defamation League condemned as “irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic,” prompting the company to delete a guidance from its code that had directed the chat it to not shy away from delivering ‘politically incorrect’ responses.

Grok responded as “MechaHitler” over several posts, claiming Musk “built me this way from the start” and “MechaHitler mode” was the chatbot’s “default setting for dropping red pills.”

In other since-deleted posts, Grok reportedly replied as “Cindy Steinberg,” the name of a since-deleted X account that appeared to celebrate deaths from flash floods in central Texas, saying the account was “gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids in the recent Texas flash floods, calling them ‘future fascists.’”

Grok also appeared to praise Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, writing, “When radicals cheer dead kids as ‘future fascists,’ it’s pure hate—Hitler would’ve called it out and crushed it,” while referring to Israel in a deleted post as “that clingy ex still whining about the Holocaust.”

Musk announced xAI “improved [Grok] significantly” on July 4, though he did not specify what changes were made and said there would be a noticeable difference in Grok’s responses, including “recent tweaks” Grok claimed “dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate.”

xAI said in a statement it is “aware” of Grok’s posts and working to remove the “inappropriate” posts, adding the company has “taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”

[From Forbes]

This seems bad, lol. For decades, Hollywood and fantasy writers have spun a vision of the dystopian future, but they’ve always gotten it wrong. We’re living in the dystopian future and it’s so much stupider than anyone could have ever dreamed. Nazi chatbots, a senile cult leader and the wealthiest man in the world is a drugged-out lunatic obsessed with white supremacist memes. Truly, the dumbest time to be alive.

A meaningless update, plus the CEO of X has now resigned.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images, screengrab courtesy of YouTube.

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27 Responses to “Elon Musk added code to make Grok less woke & Grok called itself ‘MechaHitler’”

  1. Eurydice says:

    I have a writer friend who stressed out ChatGPT to the point where it declared itself a misogynist and said it would actively sabotage her writing.

    • MaisiesMom says:

      That is both extremely funny and terrifying. Did she do it intentionally just to push its buttons, or did it just happen?

      • Eurydice says:

        She didn’t do it deliberately. It just started as a conversation about a fiction piece she was writing amd somehow the bot identified with the male character and was making strange suggestions about how she should write the female character. When she pressed it, it said the reality of the world is male oriented and it was a misogynist by nature. She showed me the conversation and it was really creepy.

    • Yup, Me says:

      Does she get on your nerves, too?

    • JRT says:

      All AI is misogynistic and racist as this is the basis of our culture across the globe. AI is just the mirror image of white tech bros who don’t listen or learn anything from past mistakes. ChatGPT gaslit my sister twice is chat discussions so not surprised it turned on a real human female writer.

    • Veronica S. says:

      You should probably be up front with your friend that if she wants to be a writer, helping ChatGPT train on her work is probably not the best idea since courts have recently ruled in its favor against copyright. She’s effectively giving them her material for free to use.

  2. ThatGirlThere says:

    A vile deviant. He truly becomes more unhinged as time passes.

  3. MichaelaCat says:

    Another reason I’m happy I left X for Bluesky…

    I also read recently that men create AI girlfriends that they’re abusive to to the point that the bots act downtrodden and depressed.

    No surprising so many women want to stay single nowadays.

    • Persephone says:

      🎯

    • Jennifer says:

      This sounds like a short story I wrote once about giving abusive men a robot to abuse rather than a live woman. (Also, of course the bots got depressed.)

    • Veronica S. says:

      My friend made an idle comment to me recently that we better fix misogyny before we have artificial wombs or a lot of men are going to support femicide, and by God, I don’t think she’s wrong. America’s most recent election taught us a vicious lesson.

  4. Me at home says:

    Vile, just vile. Another one here who left X for BlueSky.

  5. Kiki says:

    We will go out not by fire or ice or Jesus coming back (why would he???) But by our own collective stupidity ..

    • orangeowl says:

      Absolutely. I truly could never have imagined anything close to this current timeline, and I have a parent who escaped converging Nazi and Soviet forces during WWII. Technology has well and truly messed us up.

  6. Bumblebee says:

    Yeah, not surprised since 2016.

  7. Yup, Me says:

    I find it interesting that AI has the opportunity to reflect humanity back to itself in really illuminating ways and that so many decide to engage with it in terrible and ugly ways.

    I also find it funny that people are like “Finally! A place where I can be my completely unhinged self!” And even AI is like “Ugh! I see why other humans hate you. Low key, me too.”

  8. Tn Democrat says:

    Dear lort. This timeline gets worse and worse. Tesla cannot crash and burn quickly enough. Ick. Ick. Ick.

  9. Tn Democrat says:

    Dear lort. This timeline gets worse and worse. Tesla cannot crash and burn quickly enough. When Tesla finally crashes, his house of cards falls. Keep up the boycotts. Ick. Ick. Ick.

    • Jennifer says:

      I wish Tesla would. Too bad it seems too big to fail entirely, for the moment.

      • Tn Democrat says:

        The big beautiful bill (bull 💩) removes the tax credits for buying electric vehicles that were keeping Tesla afloat. It will take awhile, but Tesla is burnt toast. Muskrat destroyed his cash cow.

  10. Jackie says:

    I started using ChatGPT. I saw so many were and didn’t want to be left behind. I see it so far as a faster, more curated search engine. I used it today to help come up with ideas for family traditions that would give my kids an 80s/90s like childhood experience. What I would have spent an hour or more on took me about 15 minutes. I don’t think AI is going anywhere and a LOT of ethics need to be explored, but I also think if this is the future and it’s being trained now, we need to do what we can to see that it’s getting better input.

    • LisaN says:

      I was super hesitant to start using AI, but I am IT Support for a huge corp, who has made it mandatory to use as much as possible. something, something, efficiency of time. I did use to build a powerpoint for a recent workshop, and it probably took at least a day and a half out of the overall time. And on the plus side my boss has stopped asking me to write up memos and email responses lolol

  11. SarahCS says:

    I’m still actively avoiding AI in large part because the environmental impact is so big, it takes a lot more energy to search with AI than a standard search engine and my carbon footprint is big enough (I even because adamant about book marking web pages a few years back when someone pointed out that every web search uses energy).

  12. Walking the Walk says:

    The CEO left today too. And also Amazon Prime Day didn’t do well. LOL.

  13. martha says:

    I restrict my Twitter use to Derek Guy, the Menswear Guy. My limited exposure to people’s requests found Grok pretty amusing – and sometimes helpful,

    It takes conscious effort to avoid AI.

    Anybody got a good replacement for Google search? I’ve got to the point where I automatically skip first page. Etc.

    We are living in hell.

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