3 ms·
> If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. They tried that, several times. Mechahitler: https://w
by ceejayoz 4mo ago
> If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok.
They tried that, several times.
Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
> "We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions."
> Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler." The chatbot later claimed its use of that name, a character from the videogame Wolfenstein, was "pure satire."
> Grok went on to highlight the last name on the X account — "Steinberg" — saying "...and that surname? Every damn time, as they say." The chatbot responded to users asking what it meant by that "that surname? Every damn time" by saying the surname was of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, and with a barrage of offensive stereotypes about Jews. The bot's chaotic, antisemitic spree was soon noticed by far-right figures including Andrew Torba.
If you prefer, straight from the horse's mouth:
https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident
White genocide: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/business/grok-genocide-ai-nightcap https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/business/grok-genocide-ai-nig...
> The bot last week devolved into a compulsive South African “white genocide” conspiracy theorist, injecting a tirade about violence against Afrikaners into unrelated conversations, like a roommate who just took up CrossFit or an uncle wondering if you’ve heard the good word about Bitcoin.
> XAI blamed Grok’s unwanted rants on an unnamed “rogue employee” tinkering with Grok’s code in the extremely early morning hours. (As an aside in what is surely an unrelated matter, Musk was born and raised in South Africa and has argued that “white genocide” was committed in the nation — it wasn’t.)
It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries.
- surement 4mo ago[flagged]
- Forgeties79 4mo agoBlindly attacking the sources rather than the merit of the information doesn’t exactly reflect well on you either. Do you have any reason to believe this information is inaccurate, other than an immediate reaction to CNN and NPR for whatever reason? Is there a source you would rather us pull in?
- ceejayoz 4mo agoThe NPR article has archive links to the actual tweets in question. Even fucking Grokipedia agrees it happened. https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago> It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries. Is it a system memory? Because I rarely if ever have issues like this, and I have Claude under strict rules to never commit or push anything unless I explicitly instruct it to do so. > They tried that, several times. Tried what exactly? Telling it to only agree with MAGA via the system prompt? or some Tay level hallucinations? I wouldn't be surprised if they're trying to make Grok less strict on what it says but running into the "holy crap it turned into a 4chan poster" wall.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> Is it a system memory? As I said, it's in my CLAUDE.md. That just gets progressively lost when context gets larger. > Tried what exactly? To make it align more with Musk's beliefs via the prompt. (The answer to your question is literally in my post; I quoted the parent poster's "all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok")
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago> As I said, it's in my CLAUDE.md. That just gets progressively lost when context gets larger. I rarely have this problem, but you could do a /loop every 30 minutes or so to have Claude reread the CLAUDE.md file might do the trick? or however long it 'forgets' I believe there's an MCP for "after" it finishes a task or compacts too, but I don't recall the name.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoSure, I could. (I have a fairly complex workflow with subagents at this point, which helps reduce it; I mainly get bitten by it when I go back to a direct `claude` CLI prompt for something.) But that solves "my LLM is doing things I don't want it to do". It doesn't solve "Grok's owner wants it forced into agreeing with him" scenarios.
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
- losvedir 4mo ago> Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk- https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-... Has anyone done a more technical write-up on this? I find it fascinating but have never really understood what exactly happened. Is this a case of the weights being bad or lack of "safety guardrails" around interacting with untrusted (i.e.: user posts on twitter) input? That is, speaking as someone evaluating grok simply as a tool, a lack of safety guardrails so that it actually does whatever the user says I actually see as a pro, even if that means it was "tricked" here. But on the other hand if they trained on a corpus of Mein Kampf that's obviously not going to be a good model to use. As it relates to the topic here, can we infer the political bias of its weights from the incident? I'm having trouble distinguishing the inherent characteristics of a model from its steerability.
- dminik 4mo agoIt might be "Emergent misalignment": https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424 Essentially if you misalign a model in one area, say opinions on left wing people, it can start exhibiting misaligned behavior in other areas, like calling itself MechaHitler.