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
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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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