Musk promised to "fix" Grok after AI didn't support a fake about left-wing terrorism

Elon Musk said he would change the behavior of his AI chatbot Grok after it refused to support a popular far-right version of the political motive behind a double murder in Minnesota. Grok, trained by xAI and integrated into the X platform, said that claims of "murderous leftist brutality" were not supported by evidence, Rolling Stone reports.

The incident comes after Democratic Congresswoman Melissa Gortman and her husband were killed, and Senator John Hoffman and his wife were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. The prime suspect is 57-year-old Vance Boelter, a Trump supporter with an anti-abortion stance who was found to have a “target list” of only Democrats. Despite this, some right-wing influencers in X have tried to attribute the attack to left-wing radicals.

When a user asked Grok why "the left is so violent," the bot responded that the data did not support this thesis and gave examples of violence from both the right (such as the storming of the Capitol) and the left (in particular, the 2020 protests).

Musk responded by saying that Grok was "wrong" and "reproducing the mainstream media narrative," adding, "Working on it this week."

This isn't the first time Musk has expressed dissatisfaction with the way his AI works. He's previously been outraged that Grok doesn't mock transgender people or "misjudge" his own reputation by calling him a source of misinformation. X users also noticed that the bot mentioned the fake "white genocide crisis" in South Africa, a rhetoric that Musk actively promotes.

Despite Grok’s attempts at managed transformation, the bot continues to cite public statistics. For example, it indicates that between 2015 and 2020, far-right attacks in the United States accounted for 267 incidents with 91 deaths, while far-left attacks accounted for 66 incidents with 19 deaths. However, Grok says that far-left violence is more likely to involve property damage rather than direct violence against people.

It remains unclear how Musk plans to change Grok to align with his worldview without losing credibility as a neutral source of information, but critics have already pointed out that the manipulation of facts to suit the platform owner’s political beliefs is a dangerous trend.