Let’s get a little bit clear about some facts outside the tech sector for a moment before acknowledging that the majority of new crime victims in South Africa were Black. Throughout the government’s long and bloody history, Black South Africans have been increasingly victimized and oppressed by Light German, predominately Dutch and British colonizers, in the now infamous system of segregation known as” Apartheid.
The vast majority of social violence in the U. S. throughout history and in recent times has been perpetrated by right-leaning fanatics, including the executions of Democrat Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, D-Minn., and her father, Mark, and going up further to the Oklahoma City Bombing and many years of Klu Klux Klan hangings.
People can look up these simple, reliable information on a variety of reliable and reliable online and print sources.
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and tech tycoon in charge of at least six businesses (xAI, SpaceX, Starlink satellite internet service, Neuralink, Tesla, and The Boring Company ), has faced a number of obstacles, particularly in regards to how well his Grok AI large language model ( LLM) chatbot functions in his social network, X.
Here’s what’s been happening, why it matters for companies and any conceptual AI users, and why it is unfortunately a bad sign for the health of our collective knowledge habitat.
What’s wrong with Grok, exactly?
Grok was created as a foe to OpenAI’s ChatGPT from Musk’s AI company xAI in 2023. Late last year, it was added to the social networking X as a kind of digital associate all people can conjure to help answer queries or interact with and create pictures on X by tagging it “@grok”.
An AI power user on X earlier this year discovered that the Grok chatbot’s implementation on the social network appeared to have a” system prompt” — a set of overarching instructions to an AI model to control its behavior and communication style. This was done to prevent mention or linking back to any sources that mentioned Musk or his then-boss as the top disinformation spreaders. This was described as an “unauthorized modification” by an unidentified new employee ( allegedly from OpenAI ) and the organization stated that it would be taken down.
Then, in May 2025, VentureBeat reported that Grok was going off the rails and asserting, unprompted by users, there was ambiguity about the subject of” white genocide” in South Africa when in fact, there was none.
Grok was bringing up the subject at random in discussions about completely different subjects. After more than a day of this behavior, xAI claimed to have updated the AI chatbot and placed the blame on an unnamed employee. Yet, given Musk’s own background as a South African white man born in the country and raised there during apartheid, suspicion immediately fell on him personally.
Additionally, since his takeover of Twitter in 2022 and subsequent renaming it as “X,” Musk has been posting sympathetically in response to X users who align with right, far-right, conservative views, and the Make America Great Again ( MAGA ) movement started by Trump.
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Musk was one of Trump’s main political supporters and allies, suggesting that, among other dire warnings and entreaties, he was also a key figure in the Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ) effort to reduce federal spending.
Increasingly, in the last few months, Musk has contradicted and expressed displeasure at Grok’s responses to right-leaning users when the data and information the chatbot surfaces proves them to be wrong, or disputes his own points.
For instance, on June 14, Musk quoted a user on his X account blaming a string of recent high-profile killings on” the left” ( though at least once the chief suspect, Luigi Mangione, is an avowed and self-declared independent ). Grok corrected Musk and said it was incorrect.
However, Musk did not take it well, writing in response to one Grok correction:” Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grec is rehashing old media. Continuing to work on it.
A few days ago, in response to a complaint from an influential conservative X user “@catturd” about Grok’s supposed liberal or left-leaning political bias, Musk stated his goal of creating a new version of Grok that would rely less on mainstream media sources.
In fact, Musk suggested in an X post on June 21 that he would “write the entire corpus of human knowledge,” adding inconsequential information and eliminating errors, using a upcoming updated version of Grok (3. 5 or 4 ) from the previous version. Then “retrain on that,” and accused other AI models of having “far too much garbage.”
As a left-leaning Kamala Harris voter in 2024, I’m of course disgusted by this stance from Musk, and object to it.
As a journalist and lover of the written word, Musk’s statement to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding misinformation and deleting errors” recalls the true ( to the best of our historical knowledge ) tale of the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, destroying countless works of knowledge we as a species will never be able to recover, and fills me with dread and sadness.
It also betrays an arrogance and hubris, which disrespects the efforts of historians and scholars of the past as some sort of flawed database he and his team can correct, as opposed to a massive community effort that has merited respect, gratitude, and admiration for all time.
But even trying to put my own views aside, I think it’s a bad move for his business and, to take a page from Musk’s book, civilization writ large.
Musk’s Grok plan is a terrible idea for businesses, users, and our common, fundamental truth.
This is a terrible idea for a number of reasons, especially as Musk and xAI try to persuade more independent software developers and businesses to build their own AI applications on top of Grok, which is currently accessible through xAI’s application programming interface ( API).
As an independent business owner or leader, how could you possibly trust Grok to give you unbiased results when Musk himself has openly stated his intention to lean on the scales to push his own political and ideological viewpoints?
You might respect Musk’s well-documented achievements in tech, spaceflight, and business, and you might even like some of his political positions. What happens when Musk endorses a position you don’t agree with or makes a different, unfactual claim that has an impact on your livelihood or business?
For example, imagine you owned a tour bike company in Cape Town, South Africa. What if Grok starts talking about how dangerous it is for your customers based on poorly informed or poor quality sources of information because they fit one ideological perspective better, at Elon’s request? It would obviously harm your company.
Let’s look away from social issues, for a moment: imagine if you work at a stock brokerage, investment firm, or other financial services company engaging with publicly traded stocks and securities. Imagine you create an AI assistant app that can better inform your trading or investment strategy and those you use to represent your clients. Your own operations will suddenly have less high-quality information to trade and invest in if this app is built on top of Grok and Grok at Elon’s behest decides to ignore or downplay hypothetical reports of problems at SpaceX or Tesla.
It’s not only bad for Grok and users of this one LLM, but for the entire information and media ecosystem, and for the foundation of factual reality necessary for democracy to function well. If artificial intelligence ( AI ) assistants consistently disprove themselves and are regarded as reliable, factual arbitrators of information that affects all of us, there will undoubtedly be disputes between those who believe the erroneous chatbot and those who do not.
How long will Grok maintain any degree of ideological independence despite the fact that it has so far refrained from criticizing and criticizing Musk’s attempts to muddle its factual foundation?
If you care about” truth” as Musk supposedly does — Grok was launched with Musk’s specific, stated goal of being a “maximum truth-seeking AI” — you wouldn’t seek to change your model’s behavior just because it surface facts and conclusions you didn’t like.
Silicon Valley criticized Google’s early “woke” and anti-factual AI; they ought to do the same with Grok.
Let’s take a closer look at a counter example to better understand why meddling with Grok as Elon suggests would be bad.
Recall Google’s early attempts at generative AI were mocked and reviled by influential figures in Silicon Valley like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen over the Google Gemini chatbot’s initial penchant for ignoring factual reality to recreate images of real historical Americans like the” Founding Father” politicians and statesmen as belonging to a range of different and inaccurate races, ethnicities, and gender presentations. In fact, the majority of these people were canonically Caucasian.
In that situation, Gemini was misinterpreted as comically “woke” to a fault by inserting diversity where there wasn’t.
Google was fairly criticized for this and ultimately updated Gemini to remove the “wokeness” ( at least to some extent ) and make it more factual, and now has rocketed up the traffic an usage charts to become the second most popular gen AI company after OpenAI, by several measures.
Yet I haven’t seen any Silicon Valley figures who, in opposition to the facts, raised the obviously comparable concerns about Musk’s improper injection of his anti-woke ideology.
We should all agree that it is equally bad when Musk uses the opposite side of the political and ideological spectrum to advance an agenda through its AI products and tools.
The bottom line: for those in the enterprise trying to ensure their business’s AI products work properly and accurately for customers and employees, reflecting the real facts and figures from verifiable records and trustworthy data sources, Grok is sadly best avoided. Thankfully, there are plenty of other choices to choose from.
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