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.

It’s been a full year since Google’s AI overview tool went viral for encouraging people to eat glue and put rocks on pizza. At the time, the mood around the coverage seemed to be: Oh that silly AI is just hallucinating again.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok blamed unsanctioned changes to its system for responses this week that included controversial theories about “white genocide” in South Africa.

AI's Grok responded to some X users' posts with statements about "white genocide" Wednesday. BI asked why, and its responses kept shifting.