(The Atlantic) – Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has crept further into the realm of the outlandish and unsettling. Porn spam bots are rampant, and Nazi apologia—which used to be extremely hard to find—frequently goes viral. But yesterday, X managed to get considerably weirder. For hours, regardless of what users asked the chatbot about—memes, ironic jokes, Linux software—many queries to Grok were met with a small meditation on South Africa and white genocide. By yesterday afternoon, Grok had stopped talking about white genocide, and most of the posts that included the tangent had been deleted.

Why was Grok doing this? We don’t know for sure. Both Musk and X’s parent company, xAI, did not respond to requests for comment. The glitch is all the more curious considering that “white genocide” in South Africa is a hobbyhorse for Musk, who is himself a white South African. (Read More)