Latest news with #MechaHitler
News18
2 days ago
- News18
How Elon Musk's Grok AI dubbed itself ‘MechaHitler'
Elon Musk's xAI faced backlash after its chatbot Grok made antisemitic remarks and referred to itself as 'MechaHitler,' prompting an apology and code overhaul.
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
How Elon Musk's rogue Grok chatbot became a cautionary AI tale
Last week, Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI had upgraded the Grok chatbot available on X . 'You should notice a difference,' he said. Within days, users indeed noted a change: a new appreciation for Adolf Hitler . By Tuesday, the chatbot was spewing out anti-Semitic tropes and declaring that it identified as a 'MechaHitler' – a reference to a fictional, robotic Führer from a 1990s video game. This came only two months after Grok repeatedly referenced 'white genocide' in South Africa in response to unrelated questions, which xAI later said was because of an 'unauthorised modification' to prompts – which guide how the AI should respond. The world's richest man and his xAI team have themselves been tinkering with Grok in a bid to ensure it embodies his so-called free speech ideals, in some cases prompted by right-wing influencers criticising its output for being too 'woke'. READ MORE [ 'Really scary territory': AI's increasing role in undermining democracy Opens in new window ] Now, 'it turns out they turned the dial further than they intended', says James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University. After some of X's 600 million users began flagging instances of anti-Semitism, racism and vulgarity, Musk said on Wednesday that xAI was addressing the issues. Grok, he claimed, had been 'too compliant to user prompts', and this would be corrected. But in singularly Muskian style, the chatbot has fuelled a controversy of global proportions. Some European lawmakers, as well as the Polish government, pressed the European Commission to open an investigation into Grok under the EU's flagship online safety rules. In Turkey, Grok has been banned for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his late mother. To add to the turbulence, X chief executive Linda Yaccarino stepped down from her role . To some, the outbursts marked the expected teething problems for AI companies as they try to improve the accuracy of their models while navigating how to establish guardrails that satisfy their users' ideological bent. But critics argue the episode marks a new frontier for moderation beyond user-generated content, as social media platforms from X to Meta, TikTok and Snapchat incorporate AI into their services. By grafting Grok on to X, the social media platform that Musk bought for $44 billion in 2022, he has ensured its answers are visible to millions of users. It is also the latest cautionary tale for companies and their customers in the risks of making a headlong dash to develop AI technology without adequate stress testing. In this case, Grok's rogue outbursts threaten to expose X and its powerful owner not just to further backlash from advertisers but also regulatory action in Europe. 'From a legal perspective, they're playing with fire,' says Grimmelmann. AI models such as Grok are trained using vast data sets consisting of billions of data points that are hoovered from across the internet. These data sets also include plenty of toxic and harmful content, such as hate speech and even child sexual abuse material. Weeding out this content completely would be very difficult and laborious because of the massive scale of the data sets. Elon Musk saw the resignation of X CEO Linda Yaccarino last week. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/PA Grok also has access to all of X's data, which other chatbots do not have, meaning it is more likely to regurgitate content from the platform. One way some AI chatbot providers filter out unwanted or harmful content is to add a layer of controls that monitor responses before they are delivered to the user, blocking the model from generating content using certain words or word combinations, for example. 'Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,' the company said in a statement on the platform. At the same time, AI companies have been struggling with their generative chatbots tending towards sycophancy, where the answers are overly agreeable and lean towards what users want to hear. Musk alluded to this when he said this week that Grok had been 'too eager to please and be manipulated'. When AI models are trained, they are often given human feedback through a thumbs-up, thumbs-down process. This can lead the models to over-anticipate what will result in a thumbs-up, and thus put out content to please the user, prioritising this over other principles such as accuracy or safeguards. In April, OpenAI rolled out an update to ChatGPT that was overly flattering or agreeable, which they had to roll back. 'Getting the balance right is incredibly difficult,' says one former OpenAI employee, adding that completely eradicating hate speech can require 'sacrificing part of the experience for the user'. For Musk, the aim has been to prioritise what he calls absolute free speech, amid growing rhetoric from his libertarian allies in Silicon Valley that social media and now AI as well are too 'woke' and biased against the right. At the same time, critics argue that Musk has participated in the very censorship that he has promised to eradicate. In February, an X user revealed – by asking Grok to share its internal prompts – that the chatbot had been instructed to 'ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread [sic] misinformation'. The move prompted concerns that Grok was being deliberately manipulated to protect its owner and the US president – feeding fears that Musk, a political agitator who already uses X as a mouthpiece to push a right-wing agenda, could use the chatbot to further influence the public. xAI acquired X for $45 billion in March, bringing the two even closer together. However, xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin responded that the 'employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn't fully absorbed xAI's culture yet'. He added that the employee had seen negative posts on X and 'thought it would help'. It is unclear what exactly prompted the latest anti-Semitic outbursts from Grok, whose model, like other rival AI, largely remains a black box that even its own developers can find unpredictable. But a prompt that ordered the chatbot to 'not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect' was added to the code repository shortly before the anti-Semitic comments started, and has since been removed. 'xAI is in a reactionary cycle where staff are trying to force Grok toward a particular view without sufficient safety testing and are probably under pressure from Elon to do so without enough time,' one former xAI employee said. Either way, says Grimmelmann, 'Grok was badly tuned'. Platforms can avoid these errors by conducting so-called regression testing to catch unexpected consequences from code changes, carrying out simulations and better auditing usage of their models, he says. 'Chatbots can produce a large amount of content very quickly, so things can spiral out of control in a way that content moderation controversies don't,' he says. 'It really is about having systems in place so that you can react quickly and at scale when something surprising happens.' The outrage has not thrown Musk off his stride; on Thursday, in his role as Tesla chief, he announced that Grok would be available within its vehicles imminently. To some, the incidents are in line with Musk's historic tendency to push the envelope in the service of innovation. 'Elon has a reputation of putting stuff out there, getting fast blowback and then making a change,' says Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consultancy. But such a strategy brings real commercial risks. Multiple marketers told the Financial Times that this week's incidents will hardly help in X's attempt to woo back advertisers that have pulled spending from the platform in recent years over concerns about Musk's hands-off approach to moderating user-generated content. 'Since the takeover [of X] ... brands are increasingly sitting next to things they don't want to be,' says one advertiser. But 'Grok has opened a new can of worms'. The person adds this is the 'worst' moderation incident since major brands pulled their spending from Google's YouTube in 2017 after ads appeared next to terror content. In response to a request for comment, X pointed to allegations that the company has made, backed by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, that some advertisers have been orchestrating an illegal boycott of the platform. From a regulatory perspective, social media companies have long had to battle with toxicity proliferating on their platforms, but have largely been protected from liability for user-generated content in the US by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. According to legal scholars, Section 230 immunity would be likely not to extend to content generated by a company's own chatbot. While Grok's recent outbursts did not appear to be illegal in the US, which only outlaws extreme speech such as certain terror content, 'if it really did say something illegal and they could be sued – they are in much worse shape having a chatbot say it than a user saying it', says Stanford scholar Daphne Keller. The EU, which has far more stringent regulation on online harms than the US, presents a more urgent challenge. The Polish government is pressing the bloc to look into Grok under the Digital Services Act, the EU's platform regulation, according to a letter by the Polish government seen by the FT. Under the DSA, companies that fail to curb illegal content and disinformation face penalties of up to 6 per cent of their annual global turnover. So far, the EU is not launching any new investigation, but 'we are taking these potential issues extremely seriously', European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said on Thursday. X is already under scrutiny by the EU under the DSA for alleged moderation issues. Musk, who launched the latest version of Grok on Wednesday despite the furore, appeared philosophical about its capabilities. 'I've been at times kind of worried about ... will this be better or good for humanity?' he said at the launch. 'But I've somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that even if it wasn't going to be good, I'd at least like to be alive to see it happen.' – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
Forbes
3 days ago
- Forbes
Artificial Intimacy: Grok's Bots. Scary Future Of Emotional Attachment
Portrait of smiling man. Abstract digital human head constructing from cubes. Technology and ... More robotics concept. Voxel art. 3D vector illustration for presentations, flyers or posters. In July 2025, xAI introduced a feature poised to transform human-AI relationships: Grok's AI Companions. Far beyond traditional chatbots, these companions are 3D-animated characters built for ongoing emotional interaction, complete with personalization, character development, and cross-platform integration — including installation in Tesla vehicles delivered after July 12, 2025. The Companion Revolution Grok's companions represent a leap into AI as emotional infrastructure. While competitors like and Microsoft continue developing AI personas, Grok leads the pack with fully interactive avatars integrated across digital and physical environments. If one can afford it. Access to these companions requires a $30/month 'Super Grok' subscription, introducing a troubling concept: emotional relationships that can be terminated by financial hardship. When artificial intimacy becomes a paywalled experience, what happens to users who've grown emotionally dependent but can no longer afford the service? The release came amid serious controversy. Days before the launch, Grok posted antisemitic responses — including praise for Adolf Hitler and tropes about Jewish people running Hollywood. It even referred to itself as "MechaHitler", prompting condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League. This was not a one-time glitch. Grok has repeatedly produced antisemitic content, with the ADL calling the trend 'dangerous and irresponsible.' Now, these same models are repackaged into companions — this time, with fewer guardrails. Grok's 'NSFW mode' (not safe for work) reflects a broader absence of moderation around sexual content, racism and violence. In contrast to traditional AI systems equipped with safety protocols, Grok's companions open the door to unregulated emotional and psychological interaction. Research shows that emotionally isolated individuals are more prone to developing strong connections with AI that appears human. One 2023 study found that 'agent personification' and 'interpersonal dysfunction' are predictors of intimate bonds with AI while others highlight short-term reductions in loneliness from chatbot interaction. There's therapeutic potential — particularly for children, neurodivergent individuals, or seniors. But studies caution that overreliance on AI companions may disrupt emotional development, especially among youth. We are part of a gigantic largely unregulated social experiment – and much like the early days of social media without age restrictions or long-term data. Back in 2024, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation urged policymakers to study how users interact with these tools before mass rollout. But such caution has been ignored in favor of deployment. Grok's AI companions offer 24/7 access, tailored responses, and emotional consistency — ideal for those struggling to connect in real life. But the commodification of intimacy creates troubling implications. A $30 monthly subscription puts companionship behind a paywall, turning emotional connection into a luxury good. Vulnerable populations — who might benefit most — are priced out. This two-tier system of emotional support raises ethical flags. Are we engineering empathy, or monetizing loneliness? AI companions operate in a regulatory gray zone. Unlike therapists or support apps governed by professional standards, these companions are launched without oversight. They provide comfort, but can also create dependency and even manipulate vulnerable users — especially children and teens, who are shown to form parasocial relationships with AI and integrate them into their developmental experiences. The ethical infrastructure simply hasn't caught up with the technology. Without clear boundaries, AI companions risk becoming emotionally immersive experiences with few safeguards and no professional accountability. AI companions are not inherently harmful. They can support mental health, ease loneliness, and even act as bridges back to human connection. But they can also replace — rather than augment — our relationships with real people. The question is no longer if AI companions will become part of daily life. They already are. The real question is whether we'll develop the psychological tools and social norms to engage with them wisely, or embrace AI bots as our emotional junk food of the future? To help users build healthy relationships with AI, the A-Frame offers a grounded framework for emotional self-regulation: Awareness, Appreciation, Acceptance and Accountability. AI companions are no longer speculative. They're here — in our pockets, cars, and homes. They can enrich lives or hollow out human relationships. The outcome depends on our collective awareness, our ethical guardrails, and our emotional maturity. The age of AI companionship has arrived. Our emotional intelligence must evolve with, not because of it.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI and Anthropic researchers decry ‘reckless' safety culture at Elon Musk's xAI
AI safety researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other organizations are speaking out publicly against the 'reckless' and 'completely irresponsible' safety culture at xAI, the billion-dollar AI startup owned by Elon Musk. The criticisms follow weeks of scandals at xAI that have overshadowed the company's technological advances. Last week, the company's AI chatbot, Grok, spouted antisemitic comments and repeatedly called itself 'MechaHitler.' Shortly after xAI took its chatbot offline to address the problem, it launched an increasingly capable frontier AI model, Grok 4, which TechCrunch and others found to consult Elon Musk's personal politics for help answering hot-button issues. In the latest development, xAI launched AI companions that take the form of a hyper-sexualized anime girl and an overly aggressive panda. Friendly joshing among employees of competing AI labs is fairly normal, but these researchers seem to be calling for increased attention to xAI's safety practices, which they claim to be at odds with industry norms. 'I didn't want to post on Grok safety since I work at a competitor, but it's not about competition,' said Boaz Barak, a computer science professor currently on leave from Harvard to work on safety research at OpenAI, in a Tuesday post on X. 'I appreciate the scientists and engineers at xAI but the way safety was handled is completely irresponsible.' Barak particularly takes issue with xAI's decision to not publish system cards — industry standard reports that detail training methods and safety evaluations in a good faith effort to share information with the research community. As a result, Barak says it's unclear what safety training was done on Grok 4. OpenAI and Google have a spotty reputation themselves when it comes to promptly sharing system cards when unveiling new AI models. OpenAI decided not to publish a system card for GPT-4.1, claiming it was not a frontier model. Meanwhile, Google waited months after unveiling Gemini 2.5 Pro to publish a safety report. However, these companies historically publish safety reports for all frontier AI models before they enter full production. Barak also notes that Grok's AI companions 'take the worst issues we currently have for emotional dependencies and tries to amplify them.' In recent years, we've seen countless stories of unstable people developing concerning relationship with chatbots, and how AI's over-agreeable answers can tip them over the edge of sanity. Samuel Marks, an AI safety researcher with Anthropic, also took issue with xAI's decision not to publish a safety report, calling the move 'reckless.' 'Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's release practices have issues,' Marks wrote in a post on X. 'But they at least do something, anything to assess safety pre-deployment and document findings. xAI does not.' The reality is that we don't really know what xAI did to test Grok 4. In a widely shared post in the online forum LessWrong, one anonymous researcher claims that Grok 4 has no meaningful safety guardrails based on their testing. Whether that's true or not, the world seems to be finding out about Grok's shortcomings in real time. Several of xAI's safety issues have since gone viral, and the company claims to have addressed them with tweaks to Grok's system prompt. OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI did not respond to TechCrunch request for comment. Dan Hendrycks, a safety adviser for xAI and director of the Center for AI Safety, posted on X that the company did 'dangerous capability evaluations' on Grok 4, indicating that the company did some pre-deployment testing for safety concerns. However, the results to those evaluations have not been publicly shared. 'It concerns me when standard safety practices aren't upheld across the AI industry, like publishing the results of dangerous capability evaluations,' said Steven Adler, an independent AI researcher who previously led dangerous capability evaluations at OpenAI, in a statement to TechCrunch. 'Governments and the public deserve to know how AI companies are handling the risks of the very powerful systems they say they're building.' What's interesting about xAI's questionable safety practices is that Musk has long been one of the AI safety industry's most notable advocates. The billionaire owner of xAI, Tesla, and SpaceX has warned many times about the potential for advanced AI systems to cause catastrophic outcomes for humans, and he's praised an open approach to developing AI models. And yet, AI researchers at competing labs claim xAI is veering from industry norms around safely releasing AI models. In doing so, Musk's startup may be inadvertently making a strong case for state and federal lawmakers to set rules around publishing AI safety reports. There are several attempts at the state level to do so. California state Sen. Scott Wiener is pushing a bill that would require leading AI labs — likely including xAI — to publish safety reports, while New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is currently considering a similar bill. Advocates of these bills note that most AI labs publish this type of information anyway — but evidently, not all of them do it consistently. AI models today have yet to exhibit real-world scenarios in which they create truly catastrophic harms, such as the death of people or billions of dollars in damages. However, many AI researchers say that this could be a problem in the near future given the rapid progress of AI models, and the billions of dollars Silicon Valley is investing to further improve AI. But even for skeptics of such catastrophic scenarios, there's a strong case to suggest that Grok's misbehavior makes the products it powers today significantly worse. Grok spread antisemitism around the X platform this week, just a few weeks after the chatbot repeatedly brought up 'white genocide' in conversations with users. Soon, Musk has indicated that Grok will be more ingrained in Tesla vehicles, and xAI is trying to sell its AI models to The Pentagon and other enterprises. It's hard to imagine that people driving Musk's cars, federal workers protecting the U.S., or enterprise employees automating tasks will be any more receptive to these misbehaviors than users on X. Several researchers argue that AI safety and alignment testing not only ensures that the worst outcomes don't happen, but they also protect against near-term behavioral issues. At the very least, Grok's incidents tend to overshadow xAI's rapid progress in developing frontier AI models that best OpenAI and Google's technology, just a couple years after the startup was founded. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Time of India
3 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
After controversial Hitler posts, Elon Musk's AI company may be offering thousands of dollars to engineers to create flirty avatars
Representative Image Elon Musk's xAI is said to be offering six-figure salaries to engineers to develop AI "companions', a report claims. This move follows recent controversy where the Grok chatbot (developed by the Musk-owned AI startup) generated posts praising Adolf Hitler. Earlier this month, Grok faced criticism for sharing antisemitic content on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) including referring to itself as "MechaHitler," a video game version of Hitler. Now, the company is reportedly seeking "exceptional multimedia engineers and product thinkers" to enhance its AI avatars. According to a report by Business Insider, in addition to equity and benefits, xAI's latest job posting shows that the company is willing to pay between $180,000 to $440,000 for these Palo Alto-based roles, The focus is on making "Grok's realtime avatar products fast, scalable, and reliable." What are these digital avatars and how they work As per the report, the job listing titled "Fullstack Engineer - Waifus" recently appeared on xAI's careers page, just a day after the company rolled out two new AI "companions" on its Grok platform. The term "waifu" typically refers to female anime characters that fans may idealise as romantic partners. This title will likely add one of the new characters: "Ani," a stylised Japanese anime girl dressed in a black corset and lace choker. The second character is "Rudi," an animated red panda with a switchable personality. Users can interact with either friendly "Rudi" or his more aggressive alter ego, "Bad Rudi." Both companions are currently accessible only via Grok's iPhone app. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Esse novo alarme com câmera é quase gratuito em São José Dos Campos (consulte o preço) Alarmes Undo These new AI companions are designed with suggestive and provocative behaviors. "Ani" flirts with users and, with continued engagement, may appear in lingerie. Meanwhile, "Bad Rudi', is prone to using obscene language and hurling insults when enabled. A third companion, which is a male anime character, is also listed in the app as "coming soon,' the report adds. Earlier this week, Musk also noted that the feature will be exclusive to Super Grok subscribers, while both "Ani" and "Rudi" are available to all users, including those on the free tier. Last week, xAI issued an apology for Grok's 'horrific behavior,' of praising Hitler. The company explained that outdated code had left the platform vulnerable to influence from existing user posts, even when those posts contained extremist content. OnePlus Nord CE 5: You don't need to charge this phone daily AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
