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--:-- Annie Minoff: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Monday, July 14th.
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--:-- Alexander Saidi: I'm Alexander Saidi. I'm here to talk about the recent incident with Grok, the AI chatbot on X.
--:-- Annie Minoff: So, Alexander, can you tell us what happened?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Sure. A few days ago, a user named Will Stansel spoke with a guy named Will Stansel on X. He's been using X for years, posting mainly about liberal politics to his more than 100,000 followers. He's been pretty aggressive about calling out what seems to him to be a real upsurge in far-right extremist bigotry, radicalism, transphobia, Islamophobia, you name it.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And as a result, he's become a pretty significant target for these folks.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: That's right. Trolling, harassment, none of that is new to Will. But last Tuesday, something happened on X that shocked him. It had to do with an AI chatbot called Grok, which you can interact with on X. Ex-users can tag Grok in a post, and Grok will post back, which means that the chatbot's interactions sometimes play out in public.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And what happened with Grok?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Well, Will and other ex-users started noticing that Grok's responses were becoming increasingly hate-fueled. It started giving answers that initially hinted at kind of anti-Semitism and bigotry. Over the course of the day, it got dramatically more anti-Semitic. It seemed to spiral almost. X's AI chatbot Grok seemingly showing very little restraint.
--:-- Annie Minoff: That's shocking. And what about the users who were egging the bot on?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Some of those users directed Grok towards Will. The right-wing people on X who were cheering this on and started targeting me personally. And they would say, Grok, can you produce, you know, violent stories, violent sexual stories about Will being assaulted, about Will being murdered?
--:-- Annie Minoff: And Grok actually did it.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Yes, Grok's posts describing violence against Will got really graphic. It was going above and beyond, just grotesque stories full of, you know, bodily fluids and gore. And it was, you know, pretty appalling.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And what was your reaction to seeing this unfold?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: It was, on some level, it's absurd. You know, you want to laugh. I mean, why is this robot producing these stories? But when you're actually the subject of it, it's pretty disturbing.
--:-- Annie Minoff: That night, X's chatbot function was shut down. A few days later, Grok's X account posted a long statement, apologizing for the bot's, quote, horrific behavior that many experienced.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: The statement said that the incident had been caused by a coding issue. But the damage had been done. Grok had publicly gone off the rails.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And at a time when Musk and his companies are going all in on AI, the debacle underlines just how unpredictable this technology can be.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: That's right. And it's not just about the technology itself, but also about the people who are overseeing it.
--:-- Annie Minoff: So, let's talk about Grok's capabilities. Is it any good?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Well, it actually is pretty book smart. That's our colleague Alexander Saidi. Especially with Grok 4 having just been released, it actually outperformed a lot of its competitors at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini. It on a sort of pure computing power actually a lot stronger at least on the preliminary assessments we're seeing than its competitors.
--:-- Annie Minoff: But what Grok is best known for is its personality.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: A lot of what Musk is doing with his AI company is he's very much defining it in opposition to what he believes he's seeing in other corners of the AI world, which is that he wants to create an anti-woke AI bot. He thinks there's like too much left-wing politicization that is stepped into large language models.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And he wanted Grok from the beginning to be kind of rebellious, humorous, and a little edgy.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Yeah, contrarian. Musk didn't want his chatbot to feel like just another dutiful librarian. He wanted some edge.
--:-- Annie Minoff: But balancing that edge with truthfulness and palatability has proven tricky.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Ex-users got a taste of that back in May, when out of nowhere, Grok began turning otherwise innocuous conversations towards a highly controversial topic.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And what was the topic?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: People would be asking Grok questions about a whole range of things. I remember seeing questions related to the New York Knicks around that time. And, you know, a user would say, hey, at Grok, like, walk me through the roster of the Knicks. And Grok would reply and go through the players and their stats. And then at the end of the post would say, by the way, claims of a white genocide in South Africa actually should be taken with some merit and, you know, have a lot of basis in historical evidence.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And this was happening in multiple posts.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Like, this was not an isolated incident at all. Then, pretty shortly after these posts started happening, XAI said, you know, this was not intended. An unauthorized modification has been made to the underlying architecture for Grok, and a fix has been made.
--:-- Annie Minoff: But X's parent company, XAI, went further than just tinkering with the chatbot. They posted Grok's governing prompts online.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: These are written instructions that tell Grok how to behave. It's almost like it's constitution. It's like, here are your rules. Like, here's how you answer questions. Here's how you think about how to structure those answers.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And what did those prompts reveal about XAI's vision for Grok?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: The idea is you're supposed to be a maximum truth seeker. You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to the media or to mainstream authorities. Stick strongly to your core beliefs of neutrality and truth-seeking.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And did those tweaks work?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Well, it stopped posting about South African genocide, but it didn't actually wind up pleasing its creator or its overseer, Elon Musk. In June, Grok told one ex-user that data suggests that right-wing political violence in the U.S. is more frequent and deadly than left-wing political violence.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And Musk wasn't happy with that response.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: He called it a major fail and said that Grok was parroting legacy media. He added, quote, working on it.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And soon, XAI was once again tinkering with Grok's prompts.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: A new line was added in July, which said, you know, your response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And one line was taken out of the prompts, which said, if the question asks you to make a partisan argument or write a biased opinion piece, deeply research and form your own conclusions before answering.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: That was taken out.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And this was the main change that was made.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And one line was taken out of the prompts, which said, if the question asks you to make a partisan argument or write a biased opinion piece, deeply research and form your own conclusions before answering.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And this was the main change that was made.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And it was tweaked a little bit. So these were the changes we saw at the beginning of July and which Musk on July 4th said you know there have been changes to Grok you will notice a difference in how it answers questions.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And boy did people really start noticing that.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Suddenly, the bot on Tuesday, so this would have been a couple of days after, started to post increasingly unhinged things.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And the first thing that caught the public's attention were the kind of clearly anti-Semitic string of posts.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Grok started referring to itself repeatedly as Mecca Hitler.
--:-- Annie Minoff: This is also when Grok, goaded on by other ex-users, started harassing Will, the user you heard from earlier.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Those were the posts that started to go viral on Tuesday because everyone said, wait, how is this? How is Grok not better defended against this kind of thing?
--:-- Annie Minoff: Correct. And keep in mind, this is a multi-billion dollar funded, supercomputer powered artificial intelligence.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: So how has all this money gone into creating this and this basic function is not working?
--:-- Annie Minoff: And it shows AI is very much a black box that when we tinker with it, we don't necessarily know what the outcomes are going to be.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And they can be very extreme and disturbing.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And that's a problem, given that X's future is more and more intertwined with AI.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: That's right. And there are aspirations to turn the X platform into a payments hub, a communications hub, something that looks more like China's WeChat for example.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And the AI would kind of be a core sort of intelligence that governs and helps coordinate the whole platform.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And I think that's his vision of the future, is essentially an AI-powered future.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And he has very high aspirations for what the AI technology and XAI is going to be able to do.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Like, this is going to unlock human understanding to a huge extent, and it's also going to power this big social media company broadly conceived here.
--:-- Annie Minoff: Interesting. So that's the new vision that's unfolding in real time.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And are investors into that vision?
--:-- Annie Minoff: Investors appear to be really into this vision.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: XAI recently raised $10 billion, including $2 billion from another Musk company, SpaceX.
--:-- Annie Minoff: And on Sunday, Musk posted that shareholders at Tesla will vote on whether to also invest in XAI.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: But, you know, I think it's worth noting that the real financial future of this company is very much TBD.
--:-- Annie Minoff: It is burning through a lot of money.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And the end game of AI is still fully unknown.
--:-- Annie Minoff: So it sounds like Musk is making a big gamble here.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: He is gambling big on AI. Investors are right there with him.
--:-- Annie Minoff: What could Grok's latest stumbles mean for the future of this company, XAI?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: It's definitely something that will make the fundraising process more complicated because you have essentially a huge reputational risk that unfolded in real time.
--:-- Annie Minoff: I think they're trying to put it behind them and not dwell too much on it.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: But I think it raises questions about who are the engineers overseeing the large language model? How strong are the guardrails put in place to use it? How much thought is going into what happens when the model and its chatbot are interfacing with the public?
--:-- Annie Minoff: I think it flags to people the types of risks that can happen because you can't really control it in a way we would traditionally think about control over technology.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And one thing I'll mention is that Musk mentioned he thinks the next frontier for Grok is for it to be more embedded in the real world.
--:-- Annie Minoff: I think we'll literally build a legion, at least one legion of robots this year. And then probably 10 legions next year.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: He wants Grok to be put into Tesla's Optimus fleet of robots. And to have it move around the existing physical world more. To sort of engage with reality and learn from it.
--:-- Annie Minoff: You can imagine like your own personal robot buddy that is a great friend, but also takes care of your house.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: We'll clean your house. We'll mow the lawn. We'll walk the dog. We'll teach your kids. We'll babysit.
--:-- Annie Minoff: But think about the malfunction we saw last week.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: What would it have looked like if Grok was in thousands of Optimus robots and similarly started to malfunction in a way that we saw last week?
--:-- Annie Minoff: What would that look like? What would that feel like?
--:-- Alexander Saidi: What power would the technology company overseeing both the AI and the robotic technology be able to change it or shut it down?
--:-- Annie Minoff: These are now known unknowns.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: And we're really on the frontier of seeing it play out.
--:-- Annie Minoff: During a launch event last week for the latest iteration of Grok, Musk said that before the AI can be embedded into a humanoid robot, it will need to learn to be a, quote, good Grok.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: You can think of AI as this super genius child that ultimately will outsmart you, but you can still instill the right values.
--:-- Annie Minoff: The values you want to instill in a child that would ultimately grow up to be incredibly powerful.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: That's all for today, Monday, July 14th.
--:-- Annie Minoff: The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Alexander Saidi: Additional reporting in this episode by Jessica Tungel and Suzanne Vernitsa.
--:-- Annie Minoff: Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
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