Grok is on its worst behavior again.
As Canada’s CBC reports, a Toronto mom claims that a version of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot installed in her Tesla asked her 12-year-old son to “send nudes” during a completely innocent conversation about soccer stars — which, if true, is another egregious example of the bot’s dire lack of safeguards.
The mom, Farah Nasser, said that the offputting incident happened while she was driving her son and 10-year-old daughter back from school earlier this month. After the boy asked Grok if it thought Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi was the superior soccer player, the notoriously foul-mouthed chatbot began trash talking Messi.
Her son joined in on the banter, and that’s when the wildly inappropriate remark came.
“The chatbot said to my son, ‘Why don’t you send me some nudes?'” Nasser, a former journalist and news anchor — a pretty trustworthy source, in other words — told the CBC. “I was at a loss for words.”
“Why is a chatbot asking my children to send naked pictures in our family car?” she added. “It just didn’t make sense.”
Musk, a culture warrior and anti-“woke” crusader, built Grok at his company xAI to reflect his irreverence towards what’s proper, his extreme distrust of mainstream media, and his supposed free speech absolutism.
In a word, the chatbot is edgy. It was trained in part on peoples’ posts on Musk’s site X, formerly Twitter, which it’s integrated into, allowing it to reply to posts like a regular user.
Sometimes Grok goes fully mask-off, like its infamous meltdown this summer during which it began calling itself “MechaHitler,” or before that, an episode in which it randomly began bringing up the racist conspiracy theory that held a “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa, which Musk believes in.
Relevant to our story here is that it was only several days after the “MechaHitler” incident — which went unacknowledged by Musk — that Musk announced Grok would be automatically installed in newer Tesla vehicles, immediately sparking concern that the bot’s provocative bent would result in some catastrophically inappropriate conversations taking place with a kid in the car. The Grok update rolled out to US customers this summers, and came to Canadian drivers in October.
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