[…] On Monday, Microsoft announced that it will begin offering access to Grok AI, specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini, through its Azure AI Foundry. For the uninitiated, Grok AI is a product of xAI, which is owned by the same guy whose social media site, X, is reportedly taking money from terrorist groups—Elon Musk. The partnership, to be clear, is nowhere near the level of closeness we’ve seen between Microsoft and OpenAI, which is almost entirely powering the company’s push toward generative AI, but it’s still a step in a more, um, diverse direction.
And that partnership, however small, comes with some pretty awful timing. Just a few days prior to Microsoft’s announcement that it was starting to incorporate Grok into its Azure AI Foundry, Grok was at the center of some controversy after spiraling into Holocaust denial and peddling claims of “white genocide.” The worst part about all of that (outside of the, you know, Holocaust denial part) is that Musk’s AI might not have just randomly hallucinated all of that problematic misinformation.
As noted by the New York Times, Grok only started espousing claims of “white genocide” after an instance of the AI largely debunking a post from Musk himself suggesting white farmers are being targeted as part of a genocide in South Africa. A day after said debunk, Grok was seemingly obsessed with the idea of white genocide, bringing it up in relation to queries that had absolutely nothing to do with the idea at all. During the same time, Grok also started to cast doubt on the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust, stating it was “skeptical” about the figure. xAI has since blamed the Holocaust denialism on a “programming error,” but it’s hard not to greet that claim with some skepticism of my own.
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Source: Microsoft’s Partnership With Elon Musk’s Grok AI Isn’t a Feature—It’s a Liability
Robin Edgar
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