Ali Breland and Matteo Wong write:

Yesterday, a user on X saw a viral post of Timothée Chalamet celebrating courtside at a Knicks game and had a simple question: Who was sitting next to him? The user tapped in Grok, X’s proprietary chatbot, as people often do when they want help answering questions on the platform—the software functions like ChatGPT, except it can be summoned via reply to a post. And for the most part, Grok has performed reasonably well at providing responses. But not yesterday. Chalamet was sitting with Kylie and Kendall Jenner, but here is how the chatbot replied: “I believe you’re referring to a photo with Timothée Chalamet, but the context you mention doesn’t seem to align with this image. The post discusses South African politics, which doesn’t relate to Timothée or the people around him.” Nothing in the photo or post referenced South Africa or politics.

Grok spit out similar answers to many queries for a large chunk of time yesterday, randomly contorting its responses to mention “white genocide” in South Africa, apparently in reference to controversial claims about incidents of violence against some of the country’s white farmers. When one user asked Grok for “analysis” on a video of a small, cute pig, the chatbot offered this explanation: “The topic of White Genocide in South Africa is highly contentious. Claims of systematic targeting of white farmers exist, with farm attacks averaging 50 murders yearly, often cited as evidence. Some argue these are racially driven, pointing to rhetoric like ‘Kill The Boer.’” (Boer is a term used to refer to Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch, German, or French settlers in the country.) Nothing in the video or the accompanying text mentioned South Africa, “white genocide,” or “Kill the Boer.”

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has crept further into the realm of the outlandish and unsettling. Porn spam bots are rampant, and Nazi apologia—which used to be extremely hard to find—frequently goes viral. But yesterday, X managed to get considerably weirder. For hours, regardless of what users asked the chatbot about—memes, ironic jokes, Linux software—many queries to Grok were met with a small meditation on South Africa and white genocide. By yesterday afternoon, Grok had stopped talking about white genocide, and most of the posts that included the tangent had been deleted.

Why was Grok doing this? We don’t know for sure. Both Musk and X’s parent company, xAI, did not respond to requests for comment. (Several hours after publication, xAI posted on X explaining that “an unauthorized modification” had been made to the system prompt for the Grok bot on the platform, without specifying who made the change. xAI is now publicly sharing its system prompts on GitHub and says it will adopt additional measures to ensure a similar unauthorized change does not happen in the future.) The glitch is all the more curious considering that “white genocide” in South Africa is a hobbyhorse for Musk, who is himself a white South African. At various points over the past couple of years, Musk has posted about his belief in the existence of a plot to kill white South Africans. [Continue reading…]