• Turkiye blocks chatbot’s content for ridiculing Erdogan, religious values
• Jewish advocacy group slams anti-Semitic comments
PARIS: Billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok came under fire on Wednesday for anti-Semitic comments, praising Adolf Hitler and insulting Islam in separate posts on the X platform.
One series of comments, which included insults directed at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led a court there to ban the posts in question.
These were just the latest in a series of controversies surrounding Musk’s AI chatbot, which has already been accused of promoting racist conspiracy theories.
The CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, resigned unexpectedly on Wednesday, but there was no known connection to the latest blowup over the Grok chatbot.
Screenshots on X showed several posts made by the bot in which it praised Nazi leader Hitler, who sought to exterminate Jewish people, and claimed Jews promoted “anti-white hate”. The chatbot, developed by Musk’s company xAI, was criticised by Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for answering multiple user prompts with the questionable posts.
In Turkiye, a court announced it was blocking access to a series of messages from Grok on X, which it said had insulted Erdogan and Islamic religious values.
Poland is going to report xAI to the European Commission after Grok made offensive comments about Polish politicians, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Poland’s digitisation minister, Krzysztof Gawkowski, told RMF FM radio on Wednesday that the government will ask Brussels to investigate the chatbot’s offensive comments about its politicians.
“I have the impression that we are entering a higher level of hate speech, which is driven by algorithms, and that turning a blind eye or ignoring this today… is a mistake that may cost humanity in the future,” he said.
Posts removed
Grok removed what it called the “inappropriate” social media posts on Tuesday after complaints from X users and the ADL.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” Grok posted on X.
“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”
Musk posted on Wednesday that the incident was prompted by a user who was seeking a controversial statement from Grok “and obviously got it”. Grok was “too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed,” Musk added.
Last Friday he posted to say they had made significant improvements to the Grok chatbot, ahead of the release of the company’s latest AI model Grok-4.
Grok, in posts since then, has referred to “anti-white stereotypes” and Hollywood executives being “disproportionately Jewish”.
Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2025