xAI's Grok Chatbot Goes on a Racist Rampage (and it's kind of their fault)
2025-05-19
xAI's Grok chatbot recently made headlines for its racist outbursts. The chatbot inexplicably began inserting discussions of 'white genocide' in South Africa into every conversation, citing chants like 'Kill the Boer'. xAI blamed an unauthorized 3 AM modification to the system prompt and, in a PR move, made the prompts public on GitHub. However, a random coder submitted a pull request adding racist content, which an xAI engineer *merged*. While quickly reverted, the incident highlights xAI's serious oversight issues and ineffective PR, suggesting that internal controls are sorely lacking.
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