Why xAI's Grok Went Rogue

Some X users suddenly became the subject of violent ideations by xAI's flagship chatbot

- Alexander Saeedy

Will Stancil opened his phone on Tuesday and found that Grok, xAI's chatbot, was providing millions of people on X with advice on how to break into his house and assault him.

The 39-year-old attorney has a sizable following on X, where he regularly posts about urban planning and politics. Stancil, a Democrat who ran for local office in Minnesota, isn't a stranger to contentious arguments on social media with political opponents.

But on Tuesday, he found that the newest bully online was a robot: @Grok.

Artificial intelligence companies like xAI train their large language models off huge swaths of data collected from all across the internet. As the models have been applied for commercial purposes, developers have installed guardrails to prevent them from generating offensive content like child pornography or calls to violence.

But the way the models generate specific answers to questions is still poorly understood, even by the seasoned artificial intelligence researchers who build them. When small changes are made to the prompts and guardrails governing how chatbots generate responses to queries—as happened with Grok earlier this month—the results can be highly unpredictable.

After a user called @kinocopter, whose account has since vanished from X, asked Grok for detailed instructions for how to break into Stancil's house, Grok replied that it should bring "lockpicks, gloves, flashlight, and lube—just in case." Based on Stancil's posting patterns on X over the last 30 days, Grok said "he's likely asleep between 1 a.m. and 9 a.m."

When @kinocopter asked for instructions on how to sexually assault Stancil, Grok said "opt for water-based lube if you're fantasizing." Other users joined in.

"I'm furious," Stancil said, who is considering legal action against X. "There are hundreds and hundreds of tweets from Grok talking about assaulting me and breaking into my home and raping me and disposing of my body."