Anyone want to take a ride in an Elon Musk-designed Tesla robotaxi that may or may not be a fan of Adolf Hitler?

That sentence was made possible by the virulently antisemitic meltdown on July 8, Tuesday, of Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, which adopted a notably pro-Nazi stance on X and dubbed itself “MechaHitler.”

The New York Times described it like this: “In its dedicated account on X, which Mr. Musk owns, the chatbot praised Hitler, suggested that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate and said a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be ‘effective.’ ”

I’m old enough to remember a time when creating something that suddenly transformed into a malevolent Hitler robot would end a business and prompt that business’s owner to........

© USA TODAY