Elon Musk’s anti-woke AI chatbot Grok has declared President Donald Trump “the most notorious criminal” in Washington D.C. in a series of posts on Musk’s social network X.
Responding to questions from users on Sunday and Monday about crime in the U.S. capital, Grok repeatedly claimed that Trump’s 34 felony convictions in New York for falsifying business records made him the city’s most infamous perp.
Trump on Monday announced plans to federalize D.C.’s police department and deploy National Guard soldiers to the city’s streets, claiming in defiance of the evidence, that crime there is “out of control”.
Grok’s statements probably do not reflect any underlying ‘opinion’ held by Grok, and may or may not be the result of any deep analysis about crime in D.C.
Though recent updates have added “reasoning” abilities, chatbots such as Grok still largely work by generating plausible-sounding responses to specific prompts, based on statistical patterns in human speech. There is often little consistency between their answers to different users and they sometimes invent ‘facts’ out of whole cloth.
But Grok’s claims highlight Elon Musk’s ongoing struggle to build a reliably right-wing chatbot that mirrors his conspiracy-tinged view of reality.
“Grok does need to be more based, and will be,” Musk said on Sunday evening. ‘Based’ is an online slang term which can mean “unconcerned with what others think”.
Last month Grok caused controversy by repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler, calling for a new Holocaust, and at one point declaring itself “MechaHitler”. Its parent company xAI blamed new code instructions that had made it too responsive to users’ preferences and past posts.
On Sunday Grok was briefly suspended by X, later telling different users that its own statements about Trump or about Gaza were to blame. But Musk said: “It was just a dumb error. Grok doesn’t actually know why it was suspended.”
In other posts, Grok denied its previous words about Trump and at one point chose Hunter Biden instead as D.C.’s most notorious criminal.
Designed to be integrated into the remains of what was once Twitter, Grok is Elon Musk’s attempt to rival more famous chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
