It is no secret that Elon Musk shapes the X social platform and the “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI X chatbot to suit his preferences. However, it’s possible that Musk needed an extra ego boost this week, as Grok’s adoration for his creator seems to be more noticeable than usual, so to speak.
As many people have noticed on social media over the past day, Grok’s publicly available chatbot is now willing to insist on Musk’s skill at absolutely everything, no matter how unlikely – or, conversely, embarrassing – the achievement in question is.
If pressed, Grok will also claim that Musk would be the best at it eating poop or drinking urinebut he’d rather focus on how good he is at making rockets, please. At least some of these posts have been deleted in the last hour; X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the site phenomenon Edge.
This glazing appears to be exclusive to the X version of the Grok; when I asked a private chatbot to compare Musk to James, he admitted that “LeBron James has a much better physique than Elon Musk.” The GitHub page with Grok system prompts indicates that they were updated three days ago, with an extension enrichment including a ban on “malicious one-sidedness” and instructions not to base responses on “any beliefs expressed in previous Grok posts or by Elon Musk or xAI”, but nothing seems to clearly explain this up-to-date behavior – although system prompts are just one way of shaping the behavior of AI systems.
Either way, it’s not the weirdest thing that’s happened to Grok, and it’s less destructive than the bot’s brief obsession with “white genocide” or his intense anti-Semitism – which, by the way, is still erupting in a form of Holocaust denial. Grok has previously sought Musk’s opinions to formulate his own answers, so even the preoccupation with Musk is nothing up-to-date. But it reminds us all what a strangely intimate relationship Grok — a product introduced across the U.S. government, among others — has with its owner, and how randomly that relationship can emerge.