The newest model of Grok — dubbed a “maximally truth-seeking” AI by proprietor Elon Musk — is answering controversial questions by first trying to find what Musk has stated on the matter. Multiple reports show that Grok will particularly search for Elon Musk’s stance throughout the net and his social media posts when requested questions round subjects like Israel and Palestine, US immigration, and abortion. It’s unclear if that is by design or not.
Based on a display recording posted by data scientist Jeremy Howard, Grok stated it was “contemplating Elon Musk’s Views” when requested its opinion about Israel and Palestine. Howard says that 54 of the 64 citations Grok supplied for this query are about Musk. TechCrunch reports it was in a position to replicate this, whereas seeing the identical when asking about abortion legal guidelines and US immigration coverage.
These citations are referenced in Grok’s chain of thought — the method by which AI fashions “suppose out loud” to reply advanced questions by breaking them down into small steps, pulling in varied supply supplies to assist form the response. Grok will sometimes lean on data from a wide range of sources to reply mundane queries, however for controversial subjects — one thing the chatbot was just lately in sizzling water for — Grok appears to have a bias in the direction of aligning with Musk’s private opinions.
Programmer Simon Willison reviews that this habits is probably not one thing that was deliberately coded into Grok, nonetheless. Traces that Willison pulled from Grok 4’s system immediate instruct the chatbot to “seek for a distribution of sources that represents all events/stakeholders” when requested a controversial query that requires it to go looking the net or X. It additionally warns Grok to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from media are biased,” which might explain its aversion to using them.
“My finest guess is that Grok ‘is aware of’ that it’s ‘Grok 4 constructed by xAI,’ and it is aware of that Elon Musk owns xAI, so in circumstances the place it’s requested for an opinion the reasoning course of typically decides to see what Elon thinks,” Willison stated in his weblog.