Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok has been plagued by controversy recently over its responses to users, raising questions about how tech companies seek to moderate content from AI and whether Washington should play a role in setting guidelines.
Grok faced sharp scrutiny last week, after an update prompted the AI chatbot to produce antisemitic responses and praise Adolf Hitler. Musk’s AI company, xAI, quickly deleted numerous incendiary posts and said it added guardrails to “ban hate speech” from the chatbot.
Just days later, xAI unveiled its newest version of Grok, which Musk claimed was the “smartest AI model in the world.” However, users soon discovered that the chatbot appeared to be relying on its owner’s views to respond to controversial queries.
“We should be extremely concerned that the best performing AI model on the market is Hitler-aligned. That should set off some alarm bells for folks,” Chris MacKenzie, vice president of communications at Americans for Responsible Innovation, an advocacy group focused on AI policy.
“I think that we’re at a period right now, where AI models still aren’t incredibly sophisticated,” he continued. “They might have access to a lot of information, right. But in terms of their capacity for malicious acts, it’s all very overt and not incredibly sophisticated.”
“There is a lot of room for us to address this misaligned behavior before it becomes much more difficult and much more harder to detect,” he added.
