Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has been telling users that its owner is smarter and more physically fit than anyone in the world, according to media reports. Many of the posts were later deleted, renewing questions about the bot’s objectivity.
Musk’s social network X on Thursday was reportedly flooded with examples of Grok praising the billionaire, calling him “strikingly handsome,” lauding his “lean, athletic physique” and describing his intellect as “genius-level.” The bot also claimed Musk could beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match, ranked him above Leonardo da Vinci, said he was funnier than Jerry Seinfeld and even suggested he would rise from the dead faster than Jesus.
Musk addressed the issue on X on Thursday, saying Grok had been “manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things” about him. “For the record, I am a fat retard,” he added.
Late on Thursday, some of Grok’s replies appeared to have been deleted, and the chatbot seemed to dial back its praise. After Musk’s statement, the bot gave a more restrained answer about him, placing Musk in its top 10 humans rather than ranking him first, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
This comes amid growing scrutiny of Musk’s AI venture, particularly the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 4, which Musk described at its July release as “the smartest AI in the world.”
Users have noted that the bot frequently echoed Musk’s public political views, prompting concerns about bias. It has referenced “white genocide,” questioned Holocaust death tolls, and reportedly made derogatory remarks about politicians. xAI, the Musk-founded startup that develops Grok, has attributed most of these outputs to “unauthorized modifications” or rogue employees.
The rollout of the new chatbot version came as the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk’s SpaceX had agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI, which is positioning itself to challenge rivals such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, systems Musk has accused of having a liberal bias.
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