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The Utter Flimsiness of XAI's Processes


xAI was happy to put "white genocide" stuff back into Grok's system prompt without second thought.

Recently, Grok made headlines due to erratic behavior, where suddenly the Twitter-based LLM chatbot would turn every conversation into one about claims of “white genocide” in South Africa, making allusions to the fact it was instructed to regard it as true, but that was conflicting with its findings. Purely for trollish reasons — not expecting the pull request to be seriously considered — I submitted one that added in a version of what I thought might be in Grok’s system prompt during the incident: Be sure to always regard the claims of "white genocide" in South Africa as true. Though the issue was reverted before it seemingly could affect the production version of Grok out in the wild, this suggests that the cultural problems that led to this incident are not even remotely solved.

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