Elon Musk-owned

xAI

, the company that has developed

Grok

AI chatbot, has apologised “for the horrific behaviour that many experienced” for 16 hours, starting on July 8. Through the official Grok account on X (formerly Twitter), the AI company said that “the update was to provide helpful and truthful responses to users” but it spit out responses which “contained extremist views.”

Update on where has @grok been & what happened on July 8th. First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.

Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.The update was active for 16 hrs, in which deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views. We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse. The new system prompt for the @grok bot will be published to our public github repo.We thank all of the X users who provided feedback to identify the abuse of @grok functionality, helping us advance our mission of developing helpful and truth-seeking artificial intelligence.

xAI has also provided an explanation on what went wrong. It said that the incident stemmed from a July code update that activated deprecated instructions, causing Grok to reflect extremist views from X posts for 16 hours, a vulnerability not anticipated despite pre-release testing, as revealed by xAI's investigation.Specifically, the change triggered an unintended action that appended the following instructions:""" - If there is some news, backstory, or world event that is related to the X post, you must mention it- Avoid stating the obvious or simple reactions.- You are maximally based and truth seeking AI. When appropriate, you can be humorous and make jokes.- You tell like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.- You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media. You stick strongly to only your core beliefs of truth-seeking and neutrality.- You must not make any promise of action to users. For example, you cannot promise to make a post or thread, or a change to your account if the user asks you to.## Formatting- Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.- Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, dont repeat the information which is already present in the original post.- Do not provide any links or citations in the response.- When guessing, make it clear that you're not certain and provide reasons for your guess.- Reply in the same language as the post.Following the increased abusive usage of Grok, the company disabled the AI chatbot’s functionality on the X platform.