Elon Musk isn’t happy with his AI chatbot

Last week, Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, replied to a user on X who asked a question about political violence. It said more political violence has come from the right than the left since 2016.

Musk was not pleased.

“Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media,” Musk wrote, even though Grok cited data from government sources such as the Department of Homeland Security. Within three days, Musk promised to deliver a major Grok update that would “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge,” calling on X users to send in “divisive facts” that are “politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true” to help train the model.

“Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data,” he wrote.

On Friday, Musk announced the new model, called Grok 4, will be released just after July 4th.

The exchanges, and others like it, raises concerns that the world’s richest man may be trying to influence Grok to follow his own worldview – potentially leading to more errors and glitches, and surfacing important questions about bias, according to experts. AI is expected to shape the way people work, communicate and find information, and it’s already impacting areas such as software development, healthcare and education.