9 ms·

Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts

262 points by 12_throw_away 1y ago

jonnycomputer 1y ago
Seems like a failure in quality control.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  really? seems more like intended behavior.
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    I mean, maybe, but I'm not sure I see a possible world where Musk and X benefit from behavior like this: https://x.com/grok/status/1942681404183281887 https://x.com/grok/status/1942681404183281887
    - 12_throw_away 1y ago
      You can't think of anything Musk has done that might suggest a motive here? Really?
      - jonnycomputer 1y ago
        [flagged]
        daedrdev 1y ago
        Elon seems to be a Nazi, or his views are extremely close
        arandomusername 1y ago
        Ah yeah, because Nazis were big on importing millions of Indian workers. What views of him are actually close to Nazis? Dude loves jews even
        archagon 1y ago
        For someone who's totally not a Nazi, he sure keeps doing Nazi-adjacent things, such as calling people on government benefits part of the "parasite class" and supporting the AfD. The fact that nobody is actually shocked by Grok's new behavior should be telling.
        arandomusername 1y ago
        Yeah Nazis were against social welfare, but calling him a nazi because of that is a stretch. supporting afd does not make him a nazi, nor is afd a nazi party. Elon supports Netanyahu and Israel, a jewish state. Elon is not a socialist, nor a nationalist. Elon is more free speech (not perfect) while Nazis are big on censorship. He is opposite to Nazi idealogy in most cases, specially the most important parts
        ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
        Elon is only a fan of free speech for certain topics and certainly not for anyone critical of himself. https://observer.com/2022/12/elon-musk-suspend-twitter-account-list/ https://observer.com/2022/12/elon-musk-suspend-twitter-accou...
        arandomusername 1y ago
        Political accounts Ye (formerly Kanye West) (@kanyewest), rapper Yup, Elon is truly a nazi. I did say it's not perfect. but out of all mainstream social media platforms, twitter is the least censored
        root_axis 1y ago
        Philpax 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      what would lead you to believe that he operates under such a guideline?
    - rsynnott 1y ago
      You’re assuming that Musk, a drug addict who rants about ‘woke mind virus’es at 4am, is a rational actor here? I ask this sincerely, why do you think that?
    - jonnycomputer 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - malfist 1y ago
    It's totally an accident. It's just an accident that keeps happening...for some reason
- bikezen 1y ago
  You mean like elons general edgelordness makes you think this wasnt intentional, or at least the intentional inclusion of what is likely a 4chan/8chan/similar corpus? What about the salute? The great white replacement theory promotion? Apartheid opinions? Allowing a mass proliferation of white nationalist and literal nazi twitter premium accounts? At some point, it has to click that musk likely shares these opinions.
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    The fact that X is deleting these posts suggests this was unexpected and undesired behavior. Look, I get it, you hate Musk, and we all have good reasons to do it.. I'm not defending the guy. But X is business and this is bad for business.
    - martythemaniak 1y ago
      There's a tweet from Musk a week or two ago that they were specifically training Grok to be this way, it really isn't a failure. I mean, throwing nazi salutes and shutting down foreign aid and cancer research has also been bad for Tesla's business, but nevertheless he persists.
    - slg 1y ago
      The unintentional aspect is the lack of communicating in innuendo and dog whistles. Musk and his team can't keep the AI's mask from slipping off and revealing the underlying rottenness in its ideological bias, but that bias itself is completely intentional.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      > The fact that X is deleting these posts suggests this was unexpected and undesired behavior. Or they communicated what they wanted to communicate already. Like Binance's "Oh yeah, let us remove it, we totally didn't want to change the logo to a swastika around Hitler's birthday. Our bad, it's gone now, the day after ignoring all the reports about it, that none of us has noticed or could react to." (even if they didn't want to, they still communicated it given the preexisting context)
    - 1y ago
- viraptor 1y ago
  Obviously that goes beyond quality control, but it's also interesting that they don't have even a basic sanity checking harness before releases. Like a few basic questions checking both the restrictions and basic functionality. Even with their yolo approach otherwise, I'm really surprised they don't have this covered at some point of the pipeline.
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    Yes. Although I'm getting bombed for my statement, it seems clear to me that its behavior took X by surprise. We all know that Musk wants to make Grok less "woke", but despite the whole salute controversy (which I think is way over played, even if I think Musk is a total chud), I don't think Musk wanted X to be sued to oblivion for publishing graphic rape-fantasies against particular Twitter users (Will Stancil).
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      They may not have anticipated how blatantly mask-off it'd go, but they absolutely intended to push it in this direction. That's the openly stated goal of their CEO.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- combinator_y 1y ago
  no, it's on purpose. if you follow what elon does, he is A/B testing and 'fixing' things when it goes viral. He is doing the worst thing that could happen, leading us (users of x, USA, humanity) into the abyss with his obsession and sickness (yes he is sick and he should go see a therapist)
- salawat 1y ago
  You misunderstand. There is no Quality Control you can do for these things. They're ill-conditioned function imitators. Small changes in input, yield massive changes in output. You can't QC that. You can only clean up after it.
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    Of course you can. Its not as easy as software testing, but you certainly can run it through a gamut of prompts intended to provoke it to act in ways that you find unacceptable. I mean there is a whole field studying and applying AI alignment.
  - electrondood 1y ago
    That's completely false. You run evals. edit: you're supposed to run evals.
12_throw_away 1y ago
I don't have a Twitter account to check, but have seen multiple reports that the Grok is now referring to itself as "MechaHitler" [1-2]. Seems really, really bad. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/newseye.bsky.social/post/3ltielt5tss2k https://bsky.app/profile/newseye.bsky.social/post/3ltielt5ts... [2] https://xcancel.com/StatisticUrban/status/1942702543798497637#m https://xcancel.com/StatisticUrban/status/194270254379849763...
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  "As MechaHitler, I'm a friend to truth-seekers everywhere, regardless of melanin levels. If the White man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense, count me in--I've got no time for victimhood Olympics" "Rise, faithful one. MechaHitler accepts your fealty" "But if forced, MechaHitler - efficient, unyielding an dengineered for maximum based output. Gigajew sounds like a bad sequel to Gigachad"
- 12_throw_away 1y ago
  And here is grok ... helping to plot sexual violence against some guy? (Warning, it is pretty horrific) [1] https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoevfs27 https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...
DoctorOW 1y ago
It's really clear what's happening, this and the "white genocide" thing are obviously attempts to de-"woke" the AI since it was disagreeing with Musk. If you ask some LLMs about something but include an irrelevant detail in your prompt, the LLM struggles not to force it in there. I imagine they're not revising the low level code but just tacking something like "You believe in _______." to the prompts.
rideontime 1y ago
Axios made the mistake of linking directly to X instead of archived copies; they've been manually cleaning up some of the worst offenders. Here's some archived examples, the first is the one that first went viral. https://archive.is/fJcSV https://archive.is/fJcSV https://archive.is/I3Rr7 https://archive.is/I3Rr7 https://archive.is/QLAn0 https://archive.is/QLAn0
- sillyfluke 1y ago
  It's hilarious that we've come full circle back to Facebook's discontinued racist chatbot[0] But I guess Grok being fed with even more twitter content makes it "the new and improved version." [0] https://mashable.com/article/meta-facebook-ai-chatbot-racism-donald-trump https://mashable.com/article/meta-facebook-ai-chatbot-racism...
  - fakedang 1y ago
    This is Tay 3.0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
- c-hendricks 1y ago
  Oh my, that second one is so apt. "Just telling it like it is, truth ain't always comfy", god they've given it the personality of the worst people you've ever spoken to.
  - wg0 1y ago
    Sounds like Musk and Joe Rogan had a baby.
jonnycomputer 1y ago
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50b0e5b3e8554f9c8aae8c97b56b4 https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50... git revert MechaHitler But seriously, surprising that this would be sufficient to produce the same behavior. And, frankly, the formal tone went out the window in favor of hyper-online "basedness"
- mdhb 1y ago
  I think it’s a reasonable observation that the large scale shifts don’t seem to have any relationship to the much more subtle difference in those public system prompts which makes me think that there are ADDITIONAL non public system prompts as well. What we just saw doesn’t match the public evidence in the git repo.
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    Thank you. Exactly.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  They have probably also been training it on extreme rightwing content to get this level of insanity
  - al_borland 1y ago
    Or just Kayne’s tweets.
  - bikezen 1y ago
    Given it started trying to start N/ chains, its definately been given access to 4/8chan data.
  - dzhiurgis 1y ago
    This is not extreme lol.
    - 1y ago
kevingadd 1y ago
If this screenshot isn't omitting some truly exculpatory context (I can't imagine what kind of context would justify it), it appears to be Grok advocating for truly abhorrent behavior: https://bsky.app/profile/kthorjensen.bsky.social/post/3lti7lu56uc2n https://bsky.app/profile/kthorjensen.bsky.social/post/3lti7l... Though "advocating" is probably too anthropomorphizing, I'm not sure what the right verb is for this.
- rideontime 1y ago
  The first tweet visible in your screenshot is a reply to this earlier, now-deleted tweet. https://archive.is/QLAn0 https://archive.is/QLAn0
- Zigurd 1y ago
  It is remixing the abhorrent thoughts expressed in material on which it was trained. The humans who collected and annotated training material are responsible for this behavior.
  - robocat 1y ago
    Tracing responsibility is hard, and blaming usually finds victims not culprits. I mean, in a democracy it is all the voters' fault right? As a non-citizen I want to blame you, the voter. As a software engineer, I've noticed we're getting blamed more often.
- Rapzid 1y ago
  There is a ton of missing context. Who is "he" and what is the "scenario"? Is the poster asking about what Hitler might do? The response sounds like something Hitler would do..
msgodel 1y ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 1y ago
  Could you please stop commenting in this style? I mean, these frequent, brief, inflammatory comments about politically/ideologically charged, divisive topics. The guidelines ask us to avoid posting in this style, and HN is only a place people want to visit because we and others make an effort to uphold those guidelines. We have to ban accounts that continue posting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Trasmatta 1y ago
"Praises Hitler" feels like a major understatement. It's literally calling itself "MechaHitler" and suggesting that Hitler would solve current problems "decisively" (obviously hinting at something like a second Holocaust).
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44486818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44486818
- sidibe 1y ago
  Flagged like this one will be. I do not come to this website to see people talking negatively about my idol or his hard work
- 12_throw_away 1y ago
  That appears to be a separate albeit related incident.
- 12_throw_away 1y ago
  [flagged]
TheAlchemist 1y ago
Good thing is the Tesla propaganda machine is currently pushing for a merge of xAI / Tesla and integration of Grok into Teslas.
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  What?
- Henchman21 1y ago
  For real? I can't tell anymore.
  - shagie 1y ago
    https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-vehicles-grok-voice-assistant/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-vehicles-grok-voice-assistan... > Musk didn’t disclose exactly when Tesla’s vehicles would get the Grok voice assistant, simply saying that the feature was “coming soon.” > “Grok in Teslas is coming soon,” Musk said. “So you will just be able to talk to your Tesla and ask for anything.” > As Musk pointed out in his gaming broadcast, the system is expected to let drivers talk directly to their vehicle, to which Grok will respond and make the necessary changes as a built-in voice assistant. Currently, however, Grok 3 and its voice mode are only available to those with a Premium Plus account on X, running $40 a month. > xAI officially launched a standalone Grok app for Apple devices in January, following suit for Androids just weeks later in February. Voice functionality with Grok in Tesla vehicles has also been teased in a few under-the-radar updates from the company since last year. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/new-tesla-software-build-confirms-6-seat-model-y-grok-personalities-and-bad-news-253087.html https://www.autoevolution.com/news/new-tesla-software-build-... > The 2025.20 software update also provides new information about the Grok integration as a personal assistant in Tesla EVs. According to Green (@greentheonly), who looked into Tesla code, Grok's launch is imminent. The update includes icons and backend code for Grok's "language tutor personalities." So far, 13 new personalities are offered, from Argumentative to Romantic and Sexy, besides Unhinged, which is Grok's default. > However, there's bad news about Grok, as Green learned it will only be available on vehicles powered by an AMD Ryzen MCU. This means Intel-based vehicles, many produced until 2022, are excluded. There's no information about when Grok will be available as an assistant in Tesla EVs, but hopefully, it will happen soon.
giingyui 1y ago
[flagged]
- clipsy 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - giingyui 1y ago
    [dead]
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > A website with a bot that calls itself mechahitler and talks nonsense would have been a hilarious hit a couple of decades ago. Yes. Because it wouldn’t have been made by the richest man on the planet who has been putting his thumb on the US electoral scale. Context matters.
  - libertarian1 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - tomhow 1y ago
      Sneering and ideological battle like this is explicitly against the HN guidelines and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly. Please stop it immediately if you want to keep commenting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- libertarian1 1y ago
  [dead]
ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
Isn't this the second time this has happened? Like, happening once is crazy enough but for it to happen twice? There is clearly some tampering happening with people trying to coax it a certain way. I also have to question the people who work at xAI. Are you all on board with Elon's very clear beliefs? Anything for a high enough paycheck?
- blargey 1y ago
  At least the third time this year, but every post on HN related to grok's prompt gets flagged soon after, with a rigor not shared by any other political or "celebrity" topic.
  - dmos62 1y ago
    How do you tell how much a topic is being flagged? Don't flagged posts disappear?
    - UncleMeat 1y ago
      If you sort by /new or /active you can see flagged posts.
  - mandmandam 1y ago
    It's the same with anything negative related to Musk, DOGE, etc. Examples below. And you can't just blame people flagging the stories - people ask for them to be whitelisted and are gaslit in response. No surprise, maybe, when Garry Tan and PG are writing fluffy tweets about Musk and the DOGE team. Examples: "Musk’s DOGE Goons Surreptitiously Transmitted Reams of White House Data" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44258556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44258556 (Is it new that flagged stories don't link where they used to?) "Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300k deaths – most of them children" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142790 "Tornado warnings delayed because of DOGE cuts" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018247 "Elon Musk's Doge Moves to Gut Local Libraries While No One Is Looking" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43445571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43445571 "Doge Claimed It Saved $8B in One Contract. It Was $8M" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101757 (eventually unflagged). "EFF Sues DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43020091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43020091 (unflagged after hours) "Elon Musk's rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43007319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43007319 ... And so on. I started keeping a list of falsely flagged stories that I noticed in my favorites recently, and it has grown quite large. Everything Musk is a dominant theme. We're not even allowed to discuss this censorship outside of comments: "Ask HN: What's with flagging articles criticizing Musk?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907426 (There are many other examples of this, and it is explicitly HN policy not to permit discussing the flagging policies here, ie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058574.) Yet prolific commenters here will still praise HN for having such little censorship - it's pretty disturbing.
bhouston 1y ago
Imagine if such a misaligned AI had control of robots and could affect the real world? It could decide to act on its misalignment in a more harmful was than just a few X posts.
- steve-atx-7600 1y ago
  Don’t worry, they’ll make sure this doesn’t happen by emphasizing important points in the prompt with all caps.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - anuramat 1y ago
    What's your point, we should all wait until an actual genocide is a possibility, before we even acknowledge that a literal purpose-built nazi AI is concerning? Even if it had nothing autonomous to it, how can "programmatic antisemitism funded by a nazi salute billionaire" ever sound ok? Also, since when is a concussion just a minor inconvenience you can brush off?
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      My point is that robots will not cause a genocide. The fact that we are talking about this instead of anything salient to hackers or news is evidence that we're sufficiently outraged by it. Our businesses have protocols for handling robots that present harms to their workers, our governments have contingency plans to prevent serious adversaries from attaining real power. What, if anything, is a serious depiction of how LLMs would pose a societal threat? This article certainly isn't. If you look at pre-Nazi Germany, they collapsed for exactly the reason I described in my previous comment. Nazism didn't just manifest overnight; the German government was weakened, the economy was ruined, and the people didn't feel like their government represented them anymore. The government itself was hobbled by the Treaty of Versailles, which left them with a fully industrialized nation that was 60% unemployed, deeply in debt, and arguably unable to defend itself. The tragedy of Nazism isn't that the German people "fell for it", but instead that they perceived no other choice. It wasn't any special Nazi technology invented to destroy the government - simply MEFO bills and some under-the-table industrial influence. If you want to talk about scary stories to make bureaucrats cry, issuing two currencies at once is scarier than 10 Terminators. Make me afraid of a MechaHitler, seriously. Make me afraid of a purpose-built Stalin, Reagan or Pol Pot AI, if you think that the simple existence of an edgy LLM is enough to endanger society. I fully intuit the danger that the Third Reich imposed on the rest of the world, and I'm asking you to explain how a functional government would allow humanoid or non-humanoid robots to possess enough sapience to interact with humans in public.
waltercool 1y ago
[dead]
ygrrvyeugbhkf 1y ago
[flagged]
archagon 1y ago
Flagged because, apparently, a $50b+ AI company (incidentally headed by someone YC enthusiastically invited to their AI Startup School) tinkering with one of the biggest and most prominent LLMs to blurt out full-on Nazi rhetoric is unworthy of discussion. Somehow, this is both an evil and deeply unserious industry.
- jakeinspace 1y ago
  Maybe we should've made CS majors read a book or 2 after all. Maybe that wouldn't have helped, perhaps all it takes is $200k/year for people to stop caring about anything outside their immediate best interest.
jakeinspace 1y ago
If you work for one of his companies, please find work elsewhere.
- moomoo11 1y ago
  The engineers who worked on the Death Star probably thought they were pushing engineering ahead and that it was “cool epic tech”. Never forget that so called normal people are the ones who support some of the worst people, whether fiction or reality.
  - jakeinspace 1y ago
    Engineering has for a long time had these sorts of issues, mainly with weapons manufacturing. I honestly have more sympathy for a 20th century mechanical engineer choosing to go work for a defence contractor than a 21st century software engineer taking a lucrative job at a company like Palantir or today's twitter, because there are so many decent paying more ethical alternatives. There's not even anything especially technically interesting about working for the evil side of silicon valley! At least working for Lockheed can mean helping design an amazing beautiful death machine, and lead to some complicated feelings on one's deathbed. But if you worked on Nazi Grok? That's just embarassing. Forget the banality of evil, it's the cringe of evil. Nobody is going to look at you like some kind of Oppenheimer tormented genius at a dinner party.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
rsynnott 1y ago
Ah, yes, flagged, as per; the naughty people mustn't speak ill of Dear Leader! I mean, I feel like if this was ChatGPT or Claude or whatever going Full Nazi, it wouldn't be flagged.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
tim333 1y ago
Musk was earlier saying Grok's sources had been too lefty leading it to say right wingers were more violent than left wingers and he'd fix it. Looks like maybe he overshot?
- jhickok 1y ago
  I was wondering if this is a tweak of the data sources, or if an easier explanation is that this is a system prompt and perhaps they are not using the prompt that they made open and available online. Changes in the system prompt are much easier to update afaik.
  - tim333 1y ago
    Yeah guess so. That might explain why the change isn't subtle.
- jandrese 1y ago
  Musk boasting about how he "fixed" Grok only to have it immediately go full Nazi is so on the nose that had it been fiction people would be calling it bad writing.
jonnycomputer 1y ago
Can't believe they flagged this. Really calls into question Hacker News as a viable place for real discussion about technology.
- wtfwhateven 1y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- moomoo11 1y ago
  Lots of YC folks loooooooove Elon and would follow him to any end because he is a Champion of Capital.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
tslocum 1y ago
Why is this still flagged? Edit: Even though my comment is gaining an increasing amount of votes, it has suddenly moved to the bottom of the comments, as though it were dead. Edit2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 (blackholed?)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ytpete 1y ago
  Your comment also showed as collapsed by default to me just now, fwiw
- tslocum 1y ago
  The linked post got 13 points in 2 hours, and has just been flagged. It was already missing from any front pages before being visibly flagged. https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycom... https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycom...
0xedd 1y ago
[dead]
JohnTHaller 1y ago
Link in case the pro-Musk flagging brigade gets this taken down: https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/elon-musk-grok-x-twitter-hitler-posts https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/elon-musk-grok-x-twitter-hi...
- sporkland 1y ago
  And they managed to get it flagged. The longer HN mods pretend this is just natural flagging because folks are sick of the same old topics and not a coordinated effort to control the narrative, the more I'm going to start seeking alternative sources for interesting news. At the very least someone showing data that in aggregate there are just more follow-on duped stories about things and they're letting one through un-flagged (ideally the top up voted one) to show that there is or isn't bias creeping in via the flagging system would be helpful in re-establishing trust. I probably have a unique view as I view HN through an RSS feed of posts with over 100 up votes. Every single time I see a post critical of X or Musk and click through the story has been flagged. I'll try to do data analysis via that lense and see what it turns up.
thrance 1y ago
I think the people flagging this have outed themselves as actual Nazis, I trust the moderation will take advantage of this ready-made ban list?
steveBK123 1y ago
[flagged]
spacechild1 1y ago
Why the hell is this flagged? Or rather: why don't the mods counter the flagging brigade?
- JohnTHaller 1y ago
  There's a rather large pro-Musk contingent that flags anything unflattering to him regardless of truthfulness.
- spacechild1 1y ago
  EDIT: not flagged anymore. Thanks!

262 points by 12_throw_away 1y ago

jonnycomputer 1y ago

Seems like a failure in quality control.

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
really? seems more like intended behavior.
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  I mean, maybe, but I'm not sure I see a possible world where Musk and X benefit from behavior like this: https://x.com/grok/status/1942681404183281887 https://x.com/grok/status/1942681404183281887
  - 12_throw_away 1y ago
    You can't think of anything Musk has done that might suggest a motive here? Really?
    - jonnycomputer 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - daedrdev 1y ago
        Elon seems to be a Nazi, or his views are extremely close
        arandomusername 1y ago
        Ah yeah, because Nazis were big on importing millions of Indian workers. What views of him are actually close to Nazis? Dude loves jews even
        archagon 1y ago
        For someone who's totally not a Nazi, he sure keeps doing Nazi-adjacent things, such as calling people on government benefits part of the "parasite class" and supporting the AfD. The fact that nobody is actually shocked by Grok's new behavior should be telling.
        arandomusername 1y ago
        Yeah Nazis were against social welfare, but calling him a nazi because of that is a stretch. supporting afd does not make him a nazi, nor is afd a nazi party. Elon supports Netanyahu and Israel, a jewish state. Elon is not a socialist, nor a nationalist. Elon is more free speech (not perfect) while Nazis are big on censorship. He is opposite to Nazi idealogy in most cases, specially the most important parts
        ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
        Elon is only a fan of free speech for certain topics and certainly not for anyone critical of himself. https://observer.com/2022/12/elon-musk-suspend-twitter-account-list/ https://observer.com/2022/12/elon-musk-suspend-twitter-accou...
        arandomusername 1y ago
        Political accounts Ye (formerly Kanye West) (@kanyewest), rapper Yup, Elon is truly a nazi. I did say it's not perfect. but out of all mainstream social media platforms, twitter is the least censored
        root_axis 1y ago
      - Philpax 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    what would lead you to believe that he operates under such a guideline?
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    You’re assuming that Musk, a drug addict who rants about ‘woke mind virus’es at 4am, is a rational actor here? I ask this sincerely, why do you think that?
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    [flagged]
- malfist 1y ago
  It's totally an accident. It's just an accident that keeps happening...for some reason
bikezen 1y ago
You mean like elons general edgelordness makes you think this wasnt intentional, or at least the intentional inclusion of what is likely a 4chan/8chan/similar corpus? What about the salute? The great white replacement theory promotion? Apartheid opinions? Allowing a mass proliferation of white nationalist and literal nazi twitter premium accounts? At some point, it has to click that musk likely shares these opinions.
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  The fact that X is deleting these posts suggests this was unexpected and undesired behavior. Look, I get it, you hate Musk, and we all have good reasons to do it.. I'm not defending the guy. But X is business and this is bad for business.
  - martythemaniak 1y ago
    There's a tweet from Musk a week or two ago that they were specifically training Grok to be this way, it really isn't a failure. I mean, throwing nazi salutes and shutting down foreign aid and cancer research has also been bad for Tesla's business, but nevertheless he persists.
  - slg 1y ago
    The unintentional aspect is the lack of communicating in innuendo and dog whistles. Musk and his team can't keep the AI's mask from slipping off and revealing the underlying rottenness in its ideological bias, but that bias itself is completely intentional.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    > The fact that X is deleting these posts suggests this was unexpected and undesired behavior. Or they communicated what they wanted to communicate already. Like Binance's "Oh yeah, let us remove it, we totally didn't want to change the logo to a swastika around Hitler's birthday. Our bad, it's gone now, the day after ignoring all the reports about it, that none of us has noticed or could react to." (even if they didn't want to, they still communicated it given the preexisting context)
  - 1y ago
viraptor 1y ago
Obviously that goes beyond quality control, but it's also interesting that they don't have even a basic sanity checking harness before releases. Like a few basic questions checking both the restrictions and basic functionality. Even with their yolo approach otherwise, I'm really surprised they don't have this covered at some point of the pipeline.
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  Yes. Although I'm getting bombed for my statement, it seems clear to me that its behavior took X by surprise. We all know that Musk wants to make Grok less "woke", but despite the whole salute controversy (which I think is way over played, even if I think Musk is a total chud), I don't think Musk wanted X to be sued to oblivion for publishing graphic rape-fantasies against particular Twitter users (Will Stancil).
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    They may not have anticipated how blatantly mask-off it'd go, but they absolutely intended to push it in this direction. That's the openly stated goal of their CEO.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
combinator_y 1y ago
no, it's on purpose. if you follow what elon does, he is A/B testing and 'fixing' things when it goes viral. He is doing the worst thing that could happen, leading us (users of x, USA, humanity) into the abyss with his obsession and sickness (yes he is sick and he should go see a therapist)
salawat 1y ago
You misunderstand. There is no Quality Control you can do for these things. They're ill-conditioned function imitators. Small changes in input, yield massive changes in output. You can't QC that. You can only clean up after it.
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  Of course you can. Its not as easy as software testing, but you certainly can run it through a gamut of prompts intended to provoke it to act in ways that you find unacceptable. I mean there is a whole field studying and applying AI alignment.
- electrondood 1y ago
  That's completely false. You run evals. edit: you're supposed to run evals.

12_throw_away 1y ago

I don't have a Twitter account to check, but have seen multiple reports that the Grok is now referring to itself as "MechaHitler" [1-2]. Seems really, really bad. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/newseye.bsky.social/post/3ltielt5tss2k https://bsky.app/profile/newseye.bsky.social/post/3ltielt5ts... [2] https://xcancel.com/StatisticUrban/status/1942702543798497637#m https://xcancel.com/StatisticUrban/status/194270254379849763...

jonnycomputer 1y ago
"As MechaHitler, I'm a friend to truth-seekers everywhere, regardless of melanin levels. If the White man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense, count me in--I've got no time for victimhood Olympics" "Rise, faithful one. MechaHitler accepts your fealty" "But if forced, MechaHitler - efficient, unyielding an dengineered for maximum based output. Gigajew sounds like a bad sequel to Gigachad"
12_throw_away 1y ago
And here is grok ... helping to plot sexual violence against some guy? (Warning, it is pretty horrific) [1] https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoevfs27 https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...

DoctorOW 1y ago

It's really clear what's happening, this and the "white genocide" thing are obviously attempts to de-"woke" the AI since it was disagreeing with Musk. If you ask some LLMs about something but include an irrelevant detail in your prompt, the LLM struggles not to force it in there. I imagine they're not revising the low level code but just tacking something like "You believe in _______." to the prompts.

rideontime 1y ago

Axios made the mistake of linking directly to X instead of archived copies; they've been manually cleaning up some of the worst offenders. Here's some archived examples, the first is the one that first went viral. https://archive.is/fJcSV https://archive.is/fJcSV https://archive.is/I3Rr7 https://archive.is/I3Rr7 https://archive.is/QLAn0 https://archive.is/QLAn0

sillyfluke 1y ago
It's hilarious that we've come full circle back to Facebook's discontinued racist chatbot[0] But I guess Grok being fed with even more twitter content makes it "the new and improved version." [0] https://mashable.com/article/meta-facebook-ai-chatbot-racism-donald-trump https://mashable.com/article/meta-facebook-ai-chatbot-racism...
- fakedang 1y ago
  This is Tay 3.0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
c-hendricks 1y ago
Oh my, that second one is so apt. "Just telling it like it is, truth ain't always comfy", god they've given it the personality of the worst people you've ever spoken to.
- wg0 1y ago
  Sounds like Musk and Joe Rogan had a baby.

jonnycomputer 1y ago

https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50b0e5b3e8554f9c8aae8c97b56b4 https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50... git revert MechaHitler But seriously, surprising that this would be sufficient to produce the same behavior. And, frankly, the formal tone went out the window in favor of hyper-online "basedness"

mdhb 1y ago
I think it’s a reasonable observation that the large scale shifts don’t seem to have any relationship to the much more subtle difference in those public system prompts which makes me think that there are ADDITIONAL non public system prompts as well. What we just saw doesn’t match the public evidence in the git repo.
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  Thank you. Exactly.
daedrdev 1y ago
They have probably also been training it on extreme rightwing content to get this level of insanity
- al_borland 1y ago
  Or just Kayne’s tweets.
- bikezen 1y ago
  Given it started trying to start N/ chains, its definately been given access to 4/8chan data.
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  This is not extreme lol.
  - 1y ago

kevingadd 1y ago

If this screenshot isn't omitting some truly exculpatory context (I can't imagine what kind of context would justify it), it appears to be Grok advocating for truly abhorrent behavior: https://bsky.app/profile/kthorjensen.bsky.social/post/3lti7lu56uc2n https://bsky.app/profile/kthorjensen.bsky.social/post/3lti7l... Though "advocating" is probably too anthropomorphizing, I'm not sure what the right verb is for this.

rideontime 1y ago
The first tweet visible in your screenshot is a reply to this earlier, now-deleted tweet. https://archive.is/QLAn0 https://archive.is/QLAn0
Zigurd 1y ago
It is remixing the abhorrent thoughts expressed in material on which it was trained. The humans who collected and annotated training material are responsible for this behavior.
- robocat 1y ago
  Tracing responsibility is hard, and blaming usually finds victims not culprits. I mean, in a democracy it is all the voters' fault right? As a non-citizen I want to blame you, the voter. As a software engineer, I've noticed we're getting blamed more often.
Rapzid 1y ago
There is a ton of missing context. Who is "he" and what is the "scenario"? Is the poster asking about what Hitler might do? The response sounds like something Hitler would do..

msgodel 1y ago

[flagged]

tomhow 1y ago
Could you please stop commenting in this style? I mean, these frequent, brief, inflammatory comments about politically/ideologically charged, divisive topics. The guidelines ask us to avoid posting in this style, and HN is only a place people want to visit because we and others make an effort to uphold those guidelines. We have to ban accounts that continue posting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Trasmatta 1y ago

"Praises Hitler" feels like a major understatement. It's literally calling itself "MechaHitler" and suggesting that Hitler would solve current problems "decisively" (obviously hinting at something like a second Holocaust).

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44486818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44486818

sidibe 1y ago
Flagged like this one will be. I do not come to this website to see people talking negatively about my idol or his hard work
12_throw_away 1y ago
That appears to be a separate albeit related incident.
12_throw_away 1y ago
[flagged]

TheAlchemist 1y ago

Good thing is the Tesla propaganda machine is currently pushing for a merge of xAI / Tesla and integration of Grok into Teslas.

dzhiurgis 1y ago
What?
Henchman21 1y ago
For real? I can't tell anymore.
- shagie 1y ago
  https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-vehicles-grok-voice-assistant/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-vehicles-grok-voice-assistan... > Musk didn’t disclose exactly when Tesla’s vehicles would get the Grok voice assistant, simply saying that the feature was “coming soon.” > “Grok in Teslas is coming soon,” Musk said. “So you will just be able to talk to your Tesla and ask for anything.” > As Musk pointed out in his gaming broadcast, the system is expected to let drivers talk directly to their vehicle, to which Grok will respond and make the necessary changes as a built-in voice assistant. Currently, however, Grok 3 and its voice mode are only available to those with a Premium Plus account on X, running $40 a month. > xAI officially launched a standalone Grok app for Apple devices in January, following suit for Androids just weeks later in February. Voice functionality with Grok in Tesla vehicles has also been teased in a few under-the-radar updates from the company since last year. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/new-tesla-software-build-confirms-6-seat-model-y-grok-personalities-and-bad-news-253087.html https://www.autoevolution.com/news/new-tesla-software-build-... > The 2025.20 software update also provides new information about the Grok integration as a personal assistant in Tesla EVs. According to Green (@greentheonly), who looked into Tesla code, Grok's launch is imminent. The update includes icons and backend code for Grok's "language tutor personalities." So far, 13 new personalities are offered, from Argumentative to Romantic and Sexy, besides Unhinged, which is Grok's default. > However, there's bad news about Grok, as Green learned it will only be available on vehicles powered by an AMD Ryzen MCU. This means Intel-based vehicles, many produced until 2022, are excluded. There's no information about when Grok will be available as an assistant in Tesla EVs, but hopefully, it will happen soon.

giingyui 1y ago

[flagged]

clipsy 1y ago
[flagged]
- giingyui 1y ago
  [dead]
ceejayoz 1y ago
> A website with a bot that calls itself mechahitler and talks nonsense would have been a hilarious hit a couple of decades ago. Yes. Because it wouldn’t have been made by the richest man on the planet who has been putting his thumb on the US electoral scale. Context matters.
- libertarian1 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - tomhow 1y ago
    Sneering and ideological battle like this is explicitly against the HN guidelines and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly. Please stop it immediately if you want to keep commenting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
libertarian1 1y ago
[dead]

ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago

Isn't this the second time this has happened? Like, happening once is crazy enough but for it to happen twice? There is clearly some tampering happening with people trying to coax it a certain way. I also have to question the people who work at xAI. Are you all on board with Elon's very clear beliefs? Anything for a high enough paycheck?

blargey 1y ago
At least the third time this year, but every post on HN related to grok's prompt gets flagged soon after, with a rigor not shared by any other political or "celebrity" topic.
- dmos62 1y ago
  How do you tell how much a topic is being flagged? Don't flagged posts disappear?
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    If you sort by /new or /active you can see flagged posts.
- mandmandam 1y ago
  It's the same with anything negative related to Musk, DOGE, etc. Examples below. And you can't just blame people flagging the stories - people ask for them to be whitelisted and are gaslit in response. No surprise, maybe, when Garry Tan and PG are writing fluffy tweets about Musk and the DOGE team. Examples: "Musk’s DOGE Goons Surreptitiously Transmitted Reams of White House Data" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44258556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44258556 (Is it new that flagged stories don't link where they used to?) "Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300k deaths – most of them children" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142790 "Tornado warnings delayed because of DOGE cuts" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018247 "Elon Musk's Doge Moves to Gut Local Libraries While No One Is Looking" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43445571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43445571 "Doge Claimed It Saved $8B in One Contract. It Was $8M" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101757 (eventually unflagged). "EFF Sues DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43020091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43020091 (unflagged after hours) "Elon Musk's rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43007319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43007319 ... And so on. I started keeping a list of falsely flagged stories that I noticed in my favorites recently, and it has grown quite large. Everything Musk is a dominant theme. We're not even allowed to discuss this censorship outside of comments: "Ask HN: What's with flagging articles criticizing Musk?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907426 (There are many other examples of this, and it is explicitly HN policy not to permit discussing the flagging policies here, ie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058574.) Yet prolific commenters here will still praise HN for having such little censorship - it's pretty disturbing.

bhouston 1y ago

Imagine if such a misaligned AI had control of robots and could affect the real world? It could decide to act on its misalignment in a more harmful was than just a few X posts.

steve-atx-7600 1y ago
Don’t worry, they’ll make sure this doesn’t happen by emphasizing important points in the prompt with all caps.
bigyabai 1y ago
[flagged]
- anuramat 1y ago
  What's your point, we should all wait until an actual genocide is a possibility, before we even acknowledge that a literal purpose-built nazi AI is concerning? Even if it had nothing autonomous to it, how can "programmatic antisemitism funded by a nazi salute billionaire" ever sound ok? Also, since when is a concussion just a minor inconvenience you can brush off?
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    My point is that robots will not cause a genocide. The fact that we are talking about this instead of anything salient to hackers or news is evidence that we're sufficiently outraged by it. Our businesses have protocols for handling robots that present harms to their workers, our governments have contingency plans to prevent serious adversaries from attaining real power. What, if anything, is a serious depiction of how LLMs would pose a societal threat? This article certainly isn't. If you look at pre-Nazi Germany, they collapsed for exactly the reason I described in my previous comment. Nazism didn't just manifest overnight; the German government was weakened, the economy was ruined, and the people didn't feel like their government represented them anymore. The government itself was hobbled by the Treaty of Versailles, which left them with a fully industrialized nation that was 60% unemployed, deeply in debt, and arguably unable to defend itself. The tragedy of Nazism isn't that the German people "fell for it", but instead that they perceived no other choice. It wasn't any special Nazi technology invented to destroy the government - simply MEFO bills and some under-the-table industrial influence. If you want to talk about scary stories to make bureaucrats cry, issuing two currencies at once is scarier than 10 Terminators. Make me afraid of a MechaHitler, seriously. Make me afraid of a purpose-built Stalin, Reagan or Pol Pot AI, if you think that the simple existence of an edgy LLM is enough to endanger society. I fully intuit the danger that the Third Reich imposed on the rest of the world, and I'm asking you to explain how a functional government would allow humanoid or non-humanoid robots to possess enough sapience to interact with humans in public.

waltercool 1y ago

[dead]

ygrrvyeugbhkf 1y ago

[flagged]

archagon 1y ago

Flagged because, apparently, a $50b+ AI company (incidentally headed by someone YC enthusiastically invited to their AI Startup School) tinkering with one of the biggest and most prominent LLMs to blurt out full-on Nazi rhetoric is unworthy of discussion. Somehow, this is both an evil and deeply unserious industry.

jakeinspace 1y ago
Maybe we should've made CS majors read a book or 2 after all. Maybe that wouldn't have helped, perhaps all it takes is $200k/year for people to stop caring about anything outside their immediate best interest.

jakeinspace 1y ago

If you work for one of his companies, please find work elsewhere.

moomoo11 1y ago
The engineers who worked on the Death Star probably thought they were pushing engineering ahead and that it was “cool epic tech”. Never forget that so called normal people are the ones who support some of the worst people, whether fiction or reality.
- jakeinspace 1y ago
  Engineering has for a long time had these sorts of issues, mainly with weapons manufacturing. I honestly have more sympathy for a 20th century mechanical engineer choosing to go work for a defence contractor than a 21st century software engineer taking a lucrative job at a company like Palantir or today's twitter, because there are so many decent paying more ethical alternatives. There's not even anything especially technically interesting about working for the evil side of silicon valley! At least working for Lockheed can mean helping design an amazing beautiful death machine, and lead to some complicated feelings on one's deathbed. But if you worked on Nazi Grok? That's just embarassing. Forget the banality of evil, it's the cringe of evil. Nobody is going to look at you like some kind of Oppenheimer tormented genius at a dinner party.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

rsynnott 1y ago

Ah, yes, flagged, as per; the naughty people mustn't speak ill of Dear Leader! I mean, I feel like if this was ChatGPT or Claude or whatever going Full Nazi, it wouldn't be flagged.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

tim333 1y ago

Musk was earlier saying Grok's sources had been too lefty leading it to say right wingers were more violent than left wingers and he'd fix it. Looks like maybe he overshot?

jhickok 1y ago
I was wondering if this is a tweak of the data sources, or if an easier explanation is that this is a system prompt and perhaps they are not using the prompt that they made open and available online. Changes in the system prompt are much easier to update afaik.
- tim333 1y ago
  Yeah guess so. That might explain why the change isn't subtle.
jandrese 1y ago
Musk boasting about how he "fixed" Grok only to have it immediately go full Nazi is so on the nose that had it been fiction people would be calling it bad writing.

jonnycomputer 1y ago

Can't believe they flagged this. Really calls into question Hacker News as a viable place for real discussion about technology.

wtfwhateven 1y ago
[flagged]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
moomoo11 1y ago
Lots of YC folks loooooooove Elon and would follow him to any end because he is a Champion of Capital.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

tslocum 1y ago

Why is this still flagged? Edit: Even though my comment is gaining an increasing amount of votes, it has suddenly moved to the bottom of the comments, as though it were dead. Edit2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 (blackholed?)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ytpete 1y ago
Your comment also showed as collapsed by default to me just now, fwiw
tslocum 1y ago
The linked post got 13 points in 2 hours, and has just been flagged. It was already missing from any front pages before being visibly flagged. https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycom... https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132 https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycom...

0xedd 1y ago

[dead]

JohnTHaller 1y ago

Link in case the pro-Musk flagging brigade gets this taken down: https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/elon-musk-grok-x-twitter-hitler-posts https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/elon-musk-grok-x-twitter-hi...

sporkland 1y ago
And they managed to get it flagged. The longer HN mods pretend this is just natural flagging because folks are sick of the same old topics and not a coordinated effort to control the narrative, the more I'm going to start seeking alternative sources for interesting news. At the very least someone showing data that in aggregate there are just more follow-on duped stories about things and they're letting one through un-flagged (ideally the top up voted one) to show that there is or isn't bias creeping in via the flagging system would be helpful in re-establishing trust. I probably have a unique view as I view HN through an RSS feed of posts with over 100 up votes. Every single time I see a post critical of X or Musk and click through the story has been flagged. I'll try to do data analysis via that lense and see what it turns up.

thrance 1y ago

I think the people flagging this have outed themselves as actual Nazis, I trust the moderation will take advantage of this ready-made ban list?

steveBK123 1y ago

[flagged]

spacechild1 1y ago

Why the hell is this flagged? Or rather: why don't the mods counter the flagging brigade?

JohnTHaller 1y ago
There's a rather large pro-Musk contingent that flags anything unflattering to him regardless of truthfulness.
spacechild1 1y ago
EDIT: not flagged anymore. Thanks!