— bucetalândia (@ancient.fish) May 14, 2025 at 11:22 AM
Today, xAI released a statement with a very interesting detail: “On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, 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.”
So someone with access to Grok’s prompt got all hot and bothered at 3 in the morning about white genocide, who ever could that be! I’m sure you can come up with your own ideas, but for the sake of being thorough, let’s dig into someone who fits the two requirements of being tweaked out enough over old school South African racism to make this change and who also would have the power to do it.
A little less than twelve hours before this alteration to Grok, xAI’s CEO Elon Musk posted “The xAI team is working overtime to achieve truth with least error. It is very difficult, but essential.” Musk was up all night (US time) posting various malformed thoughts that escaped from his brain, including right around the time xAI said an “unauthorized modification was made” to Grok. His jet tracker seems to indicate that he was in Doha, Qatar at the time, which would put him ten hours ahead of Pacific Time, right in the middle of the workday (that said, as any longtime Elon observer knows, posting at late hours in the night is one of his passions).
Among his many posts the following day when he was definitely not mad online, one was a critique of the South African government and their supposed treatment of white people and another was him whining “Even though I was born in South Africa, the government will not grant Starlink a license to operate simply because I am not black” (I’m sure this refusal to grant a Starlink license has nothing to do with the widespread reports that the Trump administration is holding foreign aid hostage to try to pressure countries into signing Starlink contracts). Musk had multiple other posts condemning some videos of Black people in South Africa, and his last activity on the 14th was reposting this racist Matt Walsh tweet about white South Africans.
I wonder who could have been fiddling with Grok at the same time that Elon Musk was awake and posting right after he said the xAI team was working overtime? It is a mystery mankind may never solve!
In all seriousness, this is actually a pretty serious story despite the 12-year-old boyness of it all. The richest man in the world is obsessed with spreading propaganda that will have the net effect of immiserating or even killing Black people in South Africa and beyond. Just based on his Twitter feed, Musk is clearly pro-segregation, and the Nazi salute he made at the presidential inauguration strongly suggests that segregation is the kindest reading of his views on the world. Elon Musk is humanity’s most fundamentally broken human being, and he willingly gives us a look inside his unfathomably depraved 12-year-old boy brain every day. What we see isn’t pretty, and it’s very difficult to look at Grok becoming similarly unhinged and parroting the worst parts of Musk’s feed as anything other than exactly what it looks like.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
