On Wednesday, Elon Musk-led xAI's Grok on X shocked users by responding to unrelated questions with racially charged commentary about South Africa, sparking concerns about reliability and bias.
What Happened: In multiple cases, Grok unexpectedly referenced "white genocide" in South Africa and the controversial chant "Kill the Boer," despite being prompted with unrelated questions, as first reported by the Financial Times.
One viral example came when a user asked about Warner Bros. Discovery WBD-owned HBO’s rebranding history.
Grok noted that HBO Max changed to Max in 2023 and reportedly reverted to HBO Max in 2025. However, the chatbot then veered into an off-topic monologue.
"Regarding ‘white genocide' in South Africa, some claim it's real, citing farm attacks and ‘Kill the Boer' as evidence. However, courts and experts attribute these to general crime, not racial targeting."
Another response to a post about a Myanmar earthquake inexplicably included commentary about race relations in South Africa.
The glitch affected dozens of posts and appeared to be resolved by Wednesday afternoon, the report noted.
Now, when asked about users' concerns, Grok states, “My mistakes … stem from a combination of design flaws, training data biases and a specific glitch in my response generation process.”
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Why It's Important: While some of the Grok posts were quietly removed, the episode underscores the challenges of deploying AI tools at scale.
It also follows a series of incidents where Musk himself has amplified right-wing narratives on X, including sharing a video referencing white farmers in South Africa just days before the glitch occurred, the report said.
The episode also comes as scrutiny intensifies over generative AI models and their susceptibility to hallucinations, producing factually incorrect or irrelevant responses.
Musk has positioned Grok, developed by his startup xAI, as a "truth-seeking" alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL-owned Google's Gemini.
ChatGPT and Gemini have also previously faced criticism for bias and AI hallucination.
Elon Musk xAI | Photo courtesy: JRdes / Shutterstock.com
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