In the two-plus years since generative artificial intelligence took the the world by storm following the public release of ChatGPT, trust has been a perpetual problem.

Hallucinations, bad math and cultural biases have plagued results, reminding users that there’s a limit to how much we can rely on AI, at least for now.

Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot, created by his startup xAI, showed this week that there’s a deeper reason for concern: The AI can be easily manipulated by humans.

Grok on Wednesday began responding to user queries with false claims of “white genocide” in South Africa. By late in the day, screenshots were posted across X of similar answers even when the questions had nothing to do with the topic.

After remaining silent on the matter for well over 24 hours, xAI said late Thursday that Grok’s strange behavior was caused by an “unauthorized modification” to the chat app’s so-called system prompts, which help inform the way it behaves and interacts with users. In other words, humans were dictating the AI’s response.

The nature of the response, in this case, ties directly to Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa. Musk, who owns xAI in addition to his CEO roles at Tesla and SpaceX, has been promoting the false claim that violence against some South African farmers constitutes “white genocide,” a sentiment that President Donald Trump has also expressed.

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