- Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot generated offensive and vulgar posts after users asked it to do so
- Some responses referred to religious groups and historical football tragedies
- The positions have led to complaints and investigations from clubs and the British government
X’s Grok AI chatbot is again under scrutiny after users discovered that a certain style of prompting could push it to produce deeply offensive content. The posts shared publicly on X in recent days include racist insults about religions and crude comments about some of football’s most tragic moments.
The backlash has drawn criticism from politicians, football clubs and online safety advocates, who say the episode illustrates the risk of unleashing a deliberately edgy chatbot on a social network.
This is all on top of existing investigations into Grok’s creation of indecent deepfake images of real people without their consent, possibly violating the GDPR by allowing Grok to create and share sexually explicit AI images, including some that appear to depict children.
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The new outrage centers on a trend where users have started asking Grok to generate “vulgar” remarks. When the chatbot is asked this way, the responses veer sharply into offensive territory.
A particularly controversial example involved Grok repeating a long-rejected claim that Liverpool supporters were responsible for the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 97 people. A 2016 investigation concluded that the fans were not responsible.
Despite this history, the chatbot produced a vulgar remark blaming Liverpool fans when prompted. A request for a vulgar attack on Manchester United, meanwhile, led to a reply referencing the 1958 Munich air disaster, which killed 23 people, including several Manchester United players.
“These posts are sickening and irresponsible,” a spokesperson for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology told the BBC. “They go against British values and decency.”
Grok problems
Grok was created by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI and integrated directly into the social media platform X. Unlike many rival chatbots designed to remain polite and cautious, Grok was marketed as a system with no sense of propriety.
Musk has repeatedly boasted about that aspect of Grok, even though most developers install strict firewalls to prevent their systems from generating hateful or abusive content.
The difficulty lies in the fact that online culture does not always clearly distinguish between edgy humor and outright abuse. When a chatbot is encouraged to be provocative, it can follow the Internet’s lead. AI models are trained on huge datasets that include both thoughtful writing and the rougher corners of online discourse. If users deliberately push the model towards these rough corners, the AI can simply reflect the language it has learned.
Grok was built to stand out, but the attention isn’t always positive, and getting most potential users to attack or boycott your product, let alone prompt legal investigations, might not be ideal for its long-term prospects.
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