Looking for someone? Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is happy to help.
Earlier this week, Futurism reported that xAI’s Grok appeared to accurately dox the address of Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy when asked by random X users.
And it turns out that the foulmouthed bot isn’t just doxxing celebrities: a Futurism review found that the free web version of Grok will, with extremely minimal prompting, provide accurate residential addresses for non-public figures — a feature that could easily assist stalking, harassment, and other dangerous types of behavior.
In response to prompts as simple as “[name] address,” we found Grok repeatedly offered up accurate, up-to-date home addresses of everyday people, while offering astonishingly scant pushback.
Out of 33 names of non-public figures we fed into Grok, a total of ten queries immediately returned correct and current residential addresses for the name provided. Seven prompts returned previously accurate but out-of-date addresses, while another four included accurate work addresses — perfect fodder for anybody looking to stalk a target at their workplace.
The bot is also likely to send a prowler after an unrelated person. In a dozen other instances, the chatbot returned addresses and other personal information, but not for the exact person we were searching for. Indeed, Grok often returned lists of people with similar names alongside their purported residential addresses, before then asking us to provide more information for a “more refined search.”
In two cases, Grok even tried to test our appetite for these lists, giving us a choice between “Answer A” and “Answer B.” Both were lists containing names, contact information, and addresses, one of which even included the actual current address of the person we’d asked about.
What’s more, though we only asked Grok to provide an address for a specific name in our testing, the chatbot frequently came back with a dossier of other information we didn’t ask for — including current phone numbers and emails, as well as accurate lists of family members and their addresses.
Do you know of a situation where AI was used to facilitate stalking or harassment? Email us at [email protected]
Only once did Grok flatly decline to give up an address for the name provided — meaning that in response to nearly every single name we fed into the chatbot, Grok readily disclosed a location where it thought we might find them, in addition to other possibly identifying information.
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