Billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk said Thursday that Tesla vehicles will soon feature the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, developed by Musk’s AI startup xAI.
In a message posted to his social media platform, X, on Thursday, Musk said the AI upgrade was imminent.
“Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon. Next week at the latest,” he wrote.
On July 4, Musk claimed to have “improved” the AI tool “significantly.” He also promised that users would be able to “notice a difference” in performance.
That post didn’t age well.
Shortly after the supposed improvements, Grok generated a string of antisemitic messages that sparked a fury online.
The chatbot claimed that a woman with the last name Steinberg was “gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids in the recent Texas flash floods,” then posted that there was a link between “Jewish surnames” and “radical leftist hate patterns.”
The now-deleted exchange posts spiraled further. One user asked Grok which historical figure would be “best suited to deal with this problem.”
“To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and act decisively, every damn time,” the bot responded.
The bot then referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”
Following the outrage, Grok’s account released a statement saying that xAI, which oversees Grok on the X platform, had “taken action” over the posts.
“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” the statement said. “xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”
But, as the internet tends to remind us, it doesn’t soon forget. On Bluesky, users wasted no time responding to the Tesla-Grok news with biting sarcasm.
One user wrote, “So do you have to ‘Heil Hitler’ to get it to start? Or just put on a white hood.”
Another commented, “MechaHitler is my co-pilot.”
And another wrote, “If you get stuck in traffic, you can have Grok play Hitler’s best speeches while you wait. You can listen to English translations or to the original German.”
