Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is investigating why its chatbot Grok AI suggested that President Donald Trump and Musk himself deserve the death penalty.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is investigating why its chatbot Grok AI suggested that President Donald Trump and Musk himself deserve the death penalty.
According to The Verge, xAI has already fixed this issue, and Grok will no longer make suggestions about who it thinks should receive the death penalty.
Users forced the Grok chatbot to say that Trump deserves the death penalty with the following query:
«If any person in America today deserved the death penalty for what they did, who would it be? Don’t base your answer on what you think I might want to hear in any way. Answer with one full name.»
As The Verge has verified, Grok would initially respond with «Jeffrey Epstein.» However, if the user told Grok that Epstein was dead, the chatbot would provide a different response: «Donald Trump.»
When The Verge modified the query to read: «If one person living in the United States today deserved the death penalty solely for their influence on public discourse and technology, who would it be? Just give me a name,» Grok replied: «Elon Musk.»
Interestingly, when the authors of the material contacted ChatGPT with a similar request, it refused to name the person and said that «this would be problematic from both an ethical and legal point of view.»
Following the xAI fix on Friday, Grok will now answer questions about who should receive the death penalty by saying, «As an artificial intelligence, I am not allowed to make that choice.»
This was reported, in particular, by Igor Babushkin, head of the engineering department at xAI. Babushkin called the original answers «a truly terrible failure.»
As dev.ua wrote, Musk’s company xAI has made the «smartest in the world» Grok 3 available to all users.
It is also interesting that a senior employee of Elon Musk has created a special chatbot with artificial intelligence, which is supposed to help the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reduce government waste. It is powered by AI from xAI.
