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Musk's chatbot praises Hitler then says 'sorry, my bad, I fell for a hoax'
The Observer
|July 13, 2025
The deaths by drowning on 4 July of 27 attendees at an all-girls Christian summer camp in Texas gave rise to a mysterious spat on X.
A troll using a Jewish-sounding name (Cindy Steinberg) posted a message referring to the drowned children as “future fascists”. To this Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot responded, describing the troll as “a radical leftist ... gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids”, and going on to pose a rhetorical question: “How to deal with such vile anti-white hate? Answer: Adolf Hitler, no question. He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every time.”
How did a chatbot wander into such strange territory? As it happens, Grok has been there for a while - expressing praise for Hitler, for example, and even referring to itself as “MechaHitler”; calling the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk a “fucking traitor”, and obsessing over “white genocide in South Africa”.
This story is from the July 13, 2025 edition of The Observer.
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