On Wednesday, the world was a bit perplexed by the Grok LLM's sudden insistence on turning practically every response toward the topic of alleged "white genocide" in South Africa. xAI now says that odd behavior was the result of "an unauthorized modification" to the Grok system prompt—the core set of directions for how the LLM should behave.

That prompt modification "directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic" and "violated xAI's internal policies and core values," xAI wrote on social media. The code review process in place for such changes was "circumvented in this incident," it continued, without providing further details on how such circumvention could occur.

To prevent similar problems from happening in the future, xAI says it has now implemented "additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can't modify the prompt without review" as well as putting in place "a 24/7 monitoring team" to respond to any widespread issues with Grok's responses.

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Users on X (formerly Twitter) love to tag the verified @grok account in replies to get the large language model's take on any number of topics. On Wednesday, though, that account started largely ignoring those requests en masse in favor of redirecting the conversation toward the topic of alleged "white genocide" in South Africa and the related song "Kill the Boer."

Searching the Grok account's replies for mentions of "genocide" or "Boer" currently returns dozens if not hundreds of posts where the LLM responds to completely unrelated queries with quixotic discussions about alleged killings of white farmers in South Africa (though many have been deleted in the time just before this post went live; links in this story have been replaced with archived versions where appropriate). The sheer range of these non sequiturs is somewhat breathtaking; everything from questions about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s disinformation to discussions of MLB pitcher Max Scherzer's salary to a search for new group-specific put-downs see Grok quickly turning the subject back toward the suddenly all-important topic of South Africa.

It's like Grok has become the world's most tiresome party guest, harping on its own pet talking points to the exclusion of any other discussion.

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© Getty Images / Kyle Orland

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