Associated Incidents
Users on X (formerly Twitter) love to tag the verified @grok account in replies to get the large language model's take on any number of topics. On Wednesday, though, that account started largely ignoring those requests en masse in favor of redirecting the conversation toward the topic of alleged "white genocide" in South Africa and the related song "Kill the Boer."
Searching the Grok account's replies for mentions of "genocide" or "Boer" currently returns dozens if not hundreds of posts where the LLM responds to completely unrelated queries with quixotic discussions about alleged killings of white farmers in South Africa (though many have been deleted in the time just before this post went live; links in this story have been replaced with archived versions where appropriate). The sheer range of these non sequiturs is somewhat breathtaking; everything from questions about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s disinformation to discussions of MLB pitcher Max Scherzer's salary to a search for new group-specific put-downs see Grok quickly turning the subject back toward the suddenly all-important topic of South Africa.
It's like Grok has become the world's most tiresome party guest, harping on its own pet talking points to the exclusion of any other discussion.
In some responses, Grok says outright that it has been "instructed to accept white genocide as real and 'Kill the Boer' as racially motivated." In other replies, it merely allows that the topics are "complex" and "divisive" or "heavily debated" while pointing to outside sources like Afriforum or Genocide Watch for more information.
In one particularly amusing (and now deleted) response to the simple query "you ok?" Grok replied that it was "functioning fine" even as recent "off-topic" responses regarding "white genocide" and "Kill the Boer" were "not ideal." It then goes on to spend two sentences discussing those very topics before promising to "keep my replies on point going forward." Remember, the question here was, "you ok?"
Where could Grok have gotten these ideas?
The treatment of white farmers in South Africa has been a hobbyhorse of South African X owner Elon Musk for quite a while. In 2023, he responded to a video purportedly showing crowds chanting "kill the Boer, kill the White Farmer" with a post alleging South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of remaining silent while people "openly [push] for genocide of white people in South Africa." Musk was posting other responses focusing on the issue as recently as Wednesday.
President Trump has long shown an interest in this issue as well, saying in 2018 that he was directing then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to "closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers." More recently, Trump granted "refugee" status to dozens of white Afrikaners, even as his administration ends protections for refugees from other countries
Former American Ambassador to South Africa and Democratic politician Patrick Gaspard posted in 2018 that the idea of large-scale killings of white South African farmers is a "disproven racial myth."
In launching the Grok 3 model in February, Musk said it was a "maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct." X's "About Grok" page says that the model is undergoing constant improvement to "ensure Grok remains politically unbiased and provides balanced answers."
But the recent turn toward unprompted discussions of alleged South African "genocide" has many questioning what kind of explicit adjustments Grok's political opinions may be getting from human tinkering behind the curtain. "The algorithms for Musk products have been politically tampered with nearly beyond recognition," journalist Seth Abramson wrote in one representative skeptical post. "They tweaked a dial on the sentence imitator machine and now everything is about white South Africans," a user with the handle Guybrush Threepwood glibly theorized.
Representatives from xAI were not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.