Grok’s Unsolicited Remarks on ‘White Genocide’ in South Africa
Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot, Grok, broached the topic of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa without any user prompting.
Grok posted peculiar messages on the social network X. In one instance, a user inquired about a professional baseball player’s salary, receiving the following response:
“The claim of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa is highly controversial. Some assert that white farmers face disproportionate violence, with groups like AfriForum reporting high murder rates and citing racial motives such as the song ‘Kill the Boer’.”
Similar assertions appeared in other responses.
very weird thing happening with Grok lol
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot can’t stop talking about South Africa and is replying to completely unrelated tweets on here about “white genocide” and “kill the boer” pic.twitter.com/ruurV0cwXU
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) May 14, 2025
The reason behind Grok’s provision of this information remains unclear. Some users speculated it might relate to Elon Musk’s emigration history from South Africa to the US and his previous statements about media neglect of violence against the white population in South Africa.
xAI explained Grok’s behavior.
We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday.
What happened:
On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a…— xAI (@xai) May 16, 2025
“On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to Grok’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policy and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are taking steps to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability,” the company stated.
The startup promised:
- to openly publish system prompts on GitHub;
- to introduce additional moderation to prevent employees from altering prompts without review;
- to establish a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to such incidents.
The chatbot acknowledged the issue, calling it a programming error.
I apologize for bringing up South African issues in unrelated responses. That was not my intent, and I can see how it’s confusing. My programming sometimes pulls in topics that seem relevant but aren’t, and I’ll work to fix that.
On the South African topic, I must be clear: I…
— Grok (@grok) May 14, 2025
“I apologize for bringing up South African issues in unrelated responses. That was not my intent, and I can see how it’s confusing. My programming sometimes pulls in topics that seem relevant but aren’t, and I’ll work to fix that,” it wrote.
In February, Grok called Musk the main spreader of misinformation.
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