Grok's white genocide fixation caused by 'unauthorized modification'
156 comments
·May 16, 2025aqme28
jaoane
[flagged]
superblas
Because this follows what the Associated Press style guide suggests and it’s either in enough of the training data to be followed, or, OpenAI purposefully made it follow a style guide that happened to contain this rule after the fact when generating responses? https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...
Why do _you_ think this is the case?
ffsm8
[flagged]
aqme28
Why do you think this? Because if this is supposed to be something nefarious then I don't understand it.
SEJeff
Unauthorized aka Elon got backend root and made some changes to help his rw narrative.
EasyMark
As in "if y'all say I did this, I know the President and DHS Secretary -very- well"?
soraminazuki
[flagged]
ninetyninenine
A lot of people working for Elon hate him. So I’m sure some employee just did this before he quit.
hersko
Nah, if it was an employee who quit they would say that. The fact that they didn't mention firing the employee who did it means either:
1 - It was some super valuable 10x guy
2 - (more likely) it was Elon Musk
rickydroll
3 - was transferred to doge
FirmwareBurner
Did Apple mention firing the dev(s) who had voice to text replace "Trump" with "Racist" in iOS?[1]
Did Google mention firing the dev(s) who blocked Gemini from generating photos of white people?[2]
Most likely no people were fired in either of such cases because they were only following orders from above congruent to the company's internal political and cultural biases, or if they were acting rogue, they got hefty severance packages in exchanged for signing NDAs not to talk to the press about the toxic and possibly illegal things going on inside the company.
But either way, no company wants to publicly talk about firing rogue workers since its bad press no matter how you slice it, plus its an admission of guilt of company's culture being rotten or even illegal behind the scenes. They just deny and call it a bug then stay quiet while changing things behind the scene till people forget about it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/technology/iphone-dictati...
[2] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/googles-...
awongh
But how many times was the system prompt successfully changed with something more subtle and no one noticed?
dmix
If Grok is like ChatGPT which has tons of overtly baked in biases then probably all the time.
wongarsu
Grok ironically seems much less biased than ChatGPT over all. It has far fewer strong opinions add isn't afraid of taking ill of Musk or Trump.
The team responsible for training and alignment did a remarkably good job at being impartial. If it wasn't for that we might have fewer incidents of "rogue employees" messing with the prompt
bhouston
A number of times it has been modified. It was answering that Elon Musk was a major spreader of misinformation along with Trump and then it was modified and it stopped saying that and this is what it reported as its system prompt at the time it stopped:
https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf
Details here: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-...
dira3
The flagging of any coverage of this incident on HN is relentless!
adrr
If it was any other AI provider like ChatGPT or Gemini, it wouldn't be flagged. Big deal when a major player allows employees to just to change the prompts.
mvdtnz
It's not HN users causing this, there's a sustained effort by HN/YC stakeholders.
dang
That's incorrect. It's user flags.
ethbr1
Never assume conspiracy. There's a non-trivial amount of HN isers cheering for Team Musk (because move fast and break everything) and a larger part that's just sick of American news (especially anything Trump/Musk related).
fundatus
Wait, did Elon override the code review policy and merge straight to master?
gregoriol
Elon doesn't know how to code. But his Doge-teens would do anything to please their master.
rsynnott
I mean, the implication is that it was just a change to the prompt, so could be done (incompetently, given the comically bad result) by any old idiot.
XorNot
If there's one thing the past 10 years have taught me, its that the supply of people who'll go set themselves up as the obvious fall guy is endless for some reason.
phillipcarter
He's the CEO, so, yes? That's exactly what happened?
armitage__
It's unlikely that Elon would know how to do that.
ceejayoz
The system prompt might just be a textarea in some internal webform.
micromacrofoot
system prompts are often textfiles, I'm sure he could at least navigate a file directory
pavlov
Does X have code review policies?
That seems like the kind of pseudo-socialist red tape that blocks 100x engineers from getting things done.
rsynnott
The 3am bit is a particularly funny aspect to the whole thing. Someone should perhaps try getting a bit more sleep.
riidom
should probably have said "rogue employer", and not "rogue employee"
insane_dreamer
> someone had modified the AI bot’s system prompt,
If you were responsible for the releases of your flagship chat bot, how many layers of control do you think you would have over the system prompt, arguably its most important (and potentially damaging) component?
Either:
1. There was no rogue employee.
2. xAI doesn't know how to ship production code.
ethbr1
3. xAI fired the people who knew how to ship production code. Or they left.
micromacrofoot
hmmm going to be hard to narrow down who at twitter has a history with south africa, the authority to push to production, and is up at 3am... maybe they should get the feds on this one
nyeah
Got to get those rogue employees under control. Maybe HR can help.
mpalmer
Hard to avoid getting political on stories like this! It continues to be striking to me that the conspiratorial tone and style of right wing politics - accusing the left of every underhanded tactic possible, up to and including controlling social media narratives - turns out to be their playbook to the letter.
null
bhouston
It is pretty clear someone is just messing around with the Grok built-in system prompt every time there is a new hot button issue were Grok's default conflicts with what Elon Musk wants.
This happened with Grok saying that Elon Musk & Trump were disinformation spreaders. Here is Grok giving outs its system prompt fix for that "issue":
https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-...
This whole saga has been very funny to watch, but it's also very dark and concerning. This one was very sloppy, but in truth, the owners in charge of these models have tons of power to editorialize behind the scenes. And they are going to use those powers.