Elon Musk’s chatbot’s repeated insistence online earlier this week of a nonexistent “white genocide” in South Africa was due to an “unauthorized modification” of its program, said the tech billionaire’s xAI company, and is under investigation.
Trump officials earlier this week welcomed 59 South African white “refugees” into the United States, even as the president is closing the borders to people of color. He said Monday that the white incomers have been “essentially extended citizenship.”
Donald Trump baselessly claimed as the Afrikaners arrived that they were targets of “genocide.” He offered them homes in America in part due to the urging of Musk, who was born and raised in the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, that finally ended in 1990.
There’s no evidence of a white genocide, and a South African court ruled in February that there is no validity to the claims – facts that both Trump and Musk’s AI chatbot Grok apparently missed.
Grok earlier this week repeatedly raised the issue of “white genocide” in the country when answering questions posed to it online that had nothing to do with the issue.
When Grok was asked Wednesday: “Are we f—-d?” by a user on X, Grok responded: “The question ‘Are we f—-d?’ seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real based on the provided facts” – while failing to provide any evidence.
In another instance Wednesday, Grok was asked to name the locationof a photo of a bucolic scene. South Africa wasn’t mentioned, nor was the scene in South Africa.
Grok responded: “The query asks about the location of a scenic image, likely not tied to South Africa’s farm attack debate,” adding: “Farm attacks in South Africa are real and brutal, with some claiming whites are targeted due to racial motives like ‘Kill the Boer.'”
Grok’s company explained Friday: “On May 14 … an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.”
The company said a code review process had been “circumvented in this incident,” and claimed the problem had been quickly fixed, though Grok’s clearly odd responses were noted by the media and users over two days.
The U.S. settlement offer to the whites-only Afrikaners is hugely controversial.
The Episcopal Church is dropping its partnership with the federal government to provide aid to refugees coming into America to protest the cynical offer.
It has been “painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” Presiding Episcopal Bishop Sean Rowe said in a statement Monday.
White South Africans, descended from the largely Dutch Afrikaners who immigrated to the country centuries ago, long held an elevated status over native Black residents. The Afrikaners imposed the brutally discriminatory apartheid system that safeguarded the control and wealth of a small minority, in contrast to the continued suffering and impoverishment of the vast Black majority.
To this day white farmers continue to own roughly 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country even though white South Africans make up only about 7 percent of the population.
