When the Twitter/X chatbot, Grok, started glitching with responses about white genocide to unrelated questions, it pulled back the curtain on the people behind the AI machine. This episode was made in partnership with Vox’s Future Perfect team. It was produced by Miles Bryan and Denise Guerra, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd. Disclosures: Vox Media has a partnership with OpenAI. Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Photo by VINCENT FEURAY/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images. Help us plan for the future of Today, Explained by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Grok and its purpose?
Ahead on Today Explained. Twitter has what is effectively a built-in AI with the name Grok, which is run by a company also owned by Elon Musk called XAI. And the main function of Grok is that if you see a tweet in the world that you don't understand, you don't get the joke, you're not sure that the claim being made in the tweet is true, you can tag Grok in. You say, at Grok, is this true?
At Grok, what's the joke? At Grok, show me some context. And Grok will. It will get it right immediately. sometimes, and we'll get it wrong sometimes, and we'll get it kind of right sometimes. Again, in the way that a lot of us are familiar with chat GPT.
Last week, starting on Wednesday, every time you asked Grok a question, regardless of what the question was about, Grok would bring up white genocide and the South African anti-apartheid song, Kill the Boer, for reasons that were totally unclear based on any of those responses.
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Max Reed writes Read Max. It's a Substack newsletter on tech. And he recently wrote about how Twitter's AI, a guy named Grok, became obsessed with white genocide and a South African anti-apartheid song known as Kill the Boar.
So the song is sung at political rallies sometimes. See? It is like absolutely a huge political controversy in South Africa, whether this is a song actually sort of literally calling for killing South African whites or whether it's a kind of, you know, an expressive political act that dates back to apartheid.
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Chapter 2: Why did Grok mention white genocide?
There were people online who were giving terrible business ideas to it and asking it to rate the ideas. And they were saying, I'm literally going to sell shit on a stick. And the chatbot was saying, that is the greatest business. You are the next Warren Buffett. That is the greatest investment idea I've ever heard in my entire life. Congratulations.
The thing I'm constantly wondering about, though, is like, I mean, it's only going to get better and smarter and more functional. And then does it automatically get scarier? Because Grok will know how to better...
push you towards i don't know believing that there is a white genocide in south africa i mean i think there's a sort of funny irony going on here especially with what elon musk is up to we're talking about the way people right now use chatbots as almost like oracles you know and and we're
not just talking about, you know, sort of like, like people just staring, you know, slack jaw to their computers, just taking for granted.
I mean, just recently, Anthropic, the AI company, their lawyer filed a brief in a lawsuit with like completely hallucinated court cases inside that brief, like people from all walks of life, from all levels of sophistication are treating these LLMs like they are giving them the gospel truth, whatever they answer with.
And I think the irony to me is that the more that somebody like Elon Musk starts monkeying around with them and showing inadvertently that these are manipulable systems that can be trained to give the answers that you want to give, for better or for worse, the more it becomes clear that these kind of aren't oracles.
So this is my version of optimism is, you know, the more manipulable they become, that's the more control that we know we have over LLMs, the more they become objects of skepticism, the more they become objects of political contestation. You know, it's like any other cable news channel, any other newspaper.
It doesn't mean it's, you know, just because we can be skeptical of Fox News doesn't suddenly mean that Fox News doesn't have any power. But there are very few people who are sitting there and treating Fox News like the Oracle of Delphi, just giving us the God's honest truth with every single thing that it says.
So, you know, I don't want to say that we have to thank Elon Musk for this, but there is a kind of contradictory movement here where the sort of mysticism, what I would call the mysticism with which a lot of tech CEOs would like us to treat AI is slowly being diminished by the extent to which they are trying to control this thing that they've created.
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