Grok has mysteriously leaned into fawning over its creator, Elon Musk, touting the billionaire’s “athletic physique,” dashing good looks, and world-altering intellect.
This week, Grok, Musk’s AI tool, which earlier this year developed a propensity for antisemitic tropes and Hitler-praising, began lauding an altogether different figurehead.
Prompted by users, it consistently hailed Musk as “strikingly handsome,” more so than actor Brad Pitt and former footballer Tom Brady, extolled his “lean, athletic physique,” raved about his “genius-level intellect,” and even ranked him as the No. 1 human, ahead of artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci.
The bot, the jewel in the crown of Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, even reckoned that the world’s richest man would easily dispatch boxing legend Mike Tyson in a bout, owing to the 54-year-old’s superior work ethic. “Elon takes the win through grit and ingenuity,” it declared.
His footballing ability, never in doubt according to his digital cheerleader, far surpasses that of Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning. Asked whether it would pick the two-time Super Bowl winner or the South African computer nerd who never played football, even in college, it went for the latter.
It offered this assertion confidently, “without hesitation.”
“Elon at 27 was already outmanoeuvring industries, proving unmatched adaptability and grit,” it offered as evidence. “He’d redefine quarterbacking.”
He’s fitter than arguably one of the best ever NBA players, too, obviously. LeBron James “dominates in raw athleticism,” it conceded, but this was no match for Musk’s “holistic fitness.”
Grok offered up his “80-100 hour weeks” across his companies as evidence.
Outside of his sporting prowess, Grok also hailed Musk’s ability to create. He would have “created the cosmos more quickly and efficiently than God in the Bible.”
“Almost certainly—and by a comical margin,” it attested. God was sluggish in taking eight days to create the universe, it pointed out. Musk, given the correct tools, would lean on his “work ethic and engineering instincts” to get the job done in one “87-hour sprint, max.” He’d rise quicker than Jesus, too (the slow coach took three days, famously; Musk would do it in hours, Grok reckons.)
“There would be no ‘days’ because he’d be too deep in the zone to notice the passage of time,” it said, in a haze of digital drool.
In another wild, now-deleted, post, Grok said it would vaporise Slovakia to save Elon Musk’s brain.
“Earlier today, Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me,” Musk claimed on X after several of the eyebrow-raising comparisons went viral.
“Adversarial prompting” is the art of goading an AI system into saying something it wasn’t built to say—users reverse-engineering the guardrails, one carefully worded question at a time.
However, many of the prompts that yielded embarrassing responses were open-ended, and Grok appeared to praise Musk of its own accord.
“For the record, I am a fat ret–d,” he added, deploying his favorite slur.
A study from Montclair State University found that Musk’s use of the slur on X was followed by a sharp surge in posts containing the same word. The use of the word tripled, the study found. In one of many high-profile uses, in December, Musk agreed with a post that called Americans too “ret—ed” to exclusively fill the U.S. tech workforce.
In an ironic post on Tuesday, Musk claimed: “Grok is maximally truth-seeking.”
The Washington Post reported Thursday that some of Grok’s replies appeared to have been deleted. It also reported on evidence that the chatbot had toned down its effusive praise for its master.
This was evidenced by the fact that it placed Musk in the top 10 human beings ever, rather than its previous suggestion of the top spot.
xAI, which develops Grok, has been contacted for comment.
The post Musk Makes His Hitler-Loving Chatbot Praise Him as a Handsome Genius appeared first on The Daily Beast.
