Elon Musk's xAI confirms an 'unauthorized modification' caused the chatbot's political outbursts. The issue highlights how AI systems are direct reflections of the people behind them.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool Grok went haywire for users of the social media platform X on Wednesday, responding to innocuous queries about things like baseball and puppies with information on South Africa and a conspiracy theory called “white genocide.” It was widespread and extremely weird to witness.

Several X users were shocked yesterday when they found that asking Grok — X's AI chatbot — innocuous questions about Fortnite, HBO, and the WWE seemingly caused the bot to go off on an unrelated tangent about South Africa and "white genocide."