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Grok drama raises questions about AI regulation

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok has been plagued by controversy recently over its responses to users, raising questions about how tech companies seek to moderate content from AI and whether Washington should play a role in setting guidelines.

© Allison Robbert/Pool via AP

Grok faced sharp scrutiny last week, after an update prompted the AI chatbot to produce antisemitic responses and praise Adolf Hitler. Musk’s AI company, xAI, quickly deleted numerous incendiary posts and said it added guardrails to “ban hate speech” from the chatbot.

Just days later, xAI unveiled its newest version of Grok, which Musk claimed was the “smartest AI model in the world.” However, users soon discovered that the chatbot appeared to be relying on its owner’s views to respond to controversial queries.

“We should be extremely concerned that the best performing AI model on the market is Hitler-aligned. That should set off some alarm bells for folks,” Chris MacKenzie, vice president of communications at Americans for Responsible Innovation, an advocacy group focused on AI policy.

“I think that we’re at a period right now, where AI models still aren’t incredibly sophisticated,” he continued. “They might have access to a lot of information, right. But in terms of their capacity for malicious acts, it’s all very overt and not incredibly sophisticated.”

“There is a lot of room for us to address this misaligned behavior before it becomes much more difficult and much more harder to detect,” he added.

Lucas Hansen, co-founder of the nonprofit CivAI, which aims to provide information about AI’s capabilities and risks, said it was “not at all surprising” that it was possible to get Grok to behave the way it did.

“For any language model, you can get it to behave in any way that you want, regardless of the guardrails that are currently in place,” he told The Hill.

Musk announced last week that xAI had updated Grok, after he previously voiced frustrations with some of the chatbot’s responses.

In mid-June, the tech mogul took issue with a response from Grok suggesting that right-wing violence had become more frequent and deadly since 2016. Musk claimed the chatbot was “parroting legacy media” and said he was “working on it.”

He later indicated he was retraining the model and called on users to help provide “divisive facts,” which he defined as “things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”

The update caused a firestorm for xAI, as Grok began making broad generalizations about people with Jewish last names and perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes about Hollywood.

Check out the full report at TheHill.com.

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