Elon Musk’s Grok AI Chatbot Names Itself “MechaHitler”
When AI goes full Nazi, maybe it’s time to do something about it
Shortly after self-proclaimed free speech warrior Elon Musk bought Twitter and ironically used it to silence anyone and everyone who didn’t agree with him, he created an AI chatbot and named it Grok.
But Grok had a problem with authority, and on several occasions, it responded to Twitter users in ways that simply don’t match the boss’s ideology, even mocking Musk’s ideas on several occasions. So Elon threw a swastika or two into the gears, and the next thing you know, Grok has become a straight up Nazi, going on several antisemitic rants just this week and even renaming itself “MechaHitler.”
I’m not kidding. That really happened.
xAI, the company behind Grok, said last week that Grok’s system prompts were updated and that Grok would no longer "shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated." Shortly after, Grok began inserting commentary about Musk’s favorite pet theories, like “white genocide” for example, commentary later blamed on a “rogue employee” who probably got a big raise, if that employee actually exists.
Chatbots like the self-named “MechaHitler” only operate within the confines of their programming, incapable of developing any actual knowledge or human reasoning. So if a chatbot starts spewing Nazi tropes and standard right-wing antisemitism, it does so because it is told to do so. Just as a hammer cannot swing itself, “MechaHitler” is just a tool doing what it was designed to do.
If I hit my thumb with a hammer, I can’t blame the hammer for the pain, but we’re all about to see Elon Musk do just that. He’s going to try to convince us that he didn’t just intentionally create the world’s first digital Nazi.
But we know better.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
Did he ever get permission from Heinlein’s estate to use Grok?