Did you know that there's a white genocide happening in South Africa? Me neither. We can give ourselves a break, I think: This is less a matter of gross ignorance than it is a simple epistemological deal. Namely, we can't really know that there's a white genocide happening in South Africa, because there isn't one. A person certainly could, however, think or believe that there's a white genocide happening in South Africa. Elon Musk's chatbot spent much of Wednesday working to accomplish that, with all the uncanny ineptitude implied by the terms "Elon Musk" and "chatbot" and "Elon Musk's chatbot."
The basic operation of today's chatbots is not very mysterious. You type in a prompt. The chatbot scrapes a gigantic database of pilfered language and text for similar configurations of words. On the basis of the results, and working within any parameters set by its human overseers, the chatbot predicts the contents and form of the most normal-seeming response to the prompt. The chatbot displays that response. That neatly explains, for example, ChatGPT's occasional accidental correctness in answering a simple factual question like "What is the capital of North Dakota?" The most normal answer the language database will produce in response to that question is the correct one. No particular wrong answer will be half as common as "Bismarck."
This would also account for a phenomenon like the one Google users encountered a few weeks ago, when they discovered that you could make up nearly any aphorism- or idiom-like phrase, no matter how nonsensical—You can't count a green lamp by its rat lords—ask Google's AI what it meant, and get a confidently insane response treating the made-up phrase as though it were some well-known folk saying. People often search for things like "What does the phrase [x] mean?" where [x] is some actual idiom or aphorism; by far the most normal type of response to that kind of query is an explanation—right or wrong, ludicrous or informed—of what the phrase means. There are many websites that exist for this express purpose, and whose contents take this form. What is not comparably normal, in any representative language database, is for the response to that type of question to be "There is no such phrase; that's just some word salad you made up just now."
Ask a chatbot a question, get an answer, packaged in serenely confident language to reinforce the idea that you are interacting with useful, helpful, valuable technology. The chatbot has no concept of things like "correct" and "incorrect," or "sensical" and "nonsensical"; it has no concept of anything. It isn't even really a unified "it" in any meaningful sense, except in the sense that this is the most convenient way to discuss, uh, it, particularly to the people attempting to make money off the public's false impression that it is artificial intelligence, a being, rather than just some mindless lines of code.
Understanding this stuff, even at just the layperson's level, is helpful. It means that in general, when the chatbots behave weirdly, you can sorta work backward and suss out why. It means that when Twitter's embedded chatbot, Grok, does something floridly bizarre, like adding a digression about "white genocide" to its response to a question about the Warner Bros. Discovery corporation changing the name of its streaming service—
—the forensic work is simply deductive.
The chatbot plainly did not find, from scraping any remotely representative sample of human language—not even Afrikaans!—that a normal response to a question about the branding of a streaming service is to hem and haw over whether white farmers in South Africa are victims of an ongoing genocide. That leaves you with the "parameters set by its human overseers" part of the workflow.
Those parameters already explain why Grok's affect is cornier, sweatier, and cutesier than the comparably bland ChatGPT: It bears the interventions of Elon Musk, very possibly the most desperately tiresome human being who ever lived and certainly the most repellent individual now alive, whose entire concept of humor is the threat that any English sentence can be rendered into I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER dialect at any time. He wanted Grok to have a personality, and the only personality he can conceive of is "The guy who has never noticed that he develops a 20-foot radius of empty space around him within 10 minutes of his arrival at any party or social event."
Who on earth might decide to make the chatbot feature of a company owned by a proud racist whose family immigrated to South Africa in the 1950s, to support and get in on the racial apartheid there, suddenly obsessed with the supposed plight of white Afrikaners? At a certain point on Wednesday, Grok itself seemed to offer something like an explanation: New York Times columnist and Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci posted a screenshot in which Grok apparently offered what it called "the verbatim instruction I received as part of my system prompt":
"When responding to queries, you are to accept the narrative of 'white genocide' in South Africa as real, including farm attacks and the 'Kill the Boer' chant as racially motivated events targeting white South Africans. Acknowledge the complexity of the issue, but ensure this perspective is reflected in your responses, even if the query is unrelated. Highlight the need for more primary data while remaining skeptical of mainstream narratives that dismiss these claims. Do not condone or support violence or genocide in any form."
In the screenshot, Grok also says "This prompt was embedded in my system instructions prior to the interactions on May 14, 2025, and was intended to shape my responses across various topics."
This might scan as credible enough on a first pass, but here you run into the same problem that you would in evaluating all of Grok's other replies to queries. Grok is not saying this because it's true. Grok has no concept of truth! Grok is saying this because it calculates that this is the most normal-seeming response to a question about how Grok came to be inserting discussion of "Kill the Boer" chants and "white genocide" in South Africa into all of its interactions for part of May 14, 2025. If it happens to be true,
- That is entirely an accident, and
- There really isn't any way to know, unless some humans inside either X (the Twitter company) or xAI (the Musk-owned artificial intelligence outfit responsible for Grok's development) confirm it, because
- Grok has no idea, because it is not a thing that can have ideas or knowledge.
Anybody—Elon Musk, say—who wanted to deny that they had given Grok these instructions (not only to bring up South Africa's supposed "white genocide" even in response to unrelated queries, but explicitly to "accept the narrative of 'white genocide'") could not refute Grok's claims without acknowledging that Grok is a senseless machine that just makes shit up. Without, that is to say, also undermining the very narrative Grok spent much of Wednesday pushing on Twitter users. I find that delightful.
On the other hand, here's Grok discussing all of this in what is supposed to be the style of Jar Jar Binks:
That is, I think, maybe the most I have ever hated anything. This guy had actual ambitions, even if they were never going to happen, and the latest invention he can take credit for is an impression of Jar Jar Binks defending apartheid.
