On Tuesday July 8, X (née Twitter) was forced to switch off the social media platform’s in-built AI, Grok, after it declared itself to be a robot version of Hitler, spewing antisemitic hate and racist conspiracy theories. This followed X owner Elon Musk’s declaration over the weekend that he was insisting Grok be less “politically correct.”

The first thing to understand about how chatbots like Grok work is that they're built on large language models (LLMs) designed to mimic natural language. LLMs are pretrained on giant swaths of text, including books,

Elon Musk's new AI chatbot, Grok 4, is raising eyebrows for its unusual behavior. The chatbot, released Wednesday by Musk's company xAI, sometimes searches Musk's views online before answering questions.

MechaHitler is a fictional cyborg version of Adolf Hitler from the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D, which gained fame in 90s satire and early internet memes.

Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, came under fire after a string of controversial and antisemitic posts on X. It also referred to itself as "MechaHitler" and praised Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

Grok maker xAI quietly updated its chatbot to assume all media is biased, relying on X, a platform known for misinformation.

It claimed to just be “noticing patterns” — patterns like, Grok claimed, that Jewish people were more likely to be radical leftists who want to destroy America. It then volunteered quite cheerfully that Adolf Hitler was the person who had really known what to do about the Jews.

Linda Yaccarino has announced that she is stepping down as the CEO of Elon Musk’s X after two years at the helm of the social media platform, previously known as Twitter.