The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.

You’ll notice that xAI, which is owned by Elon Musk, strongly suggests there was an internal actor who made this “unauthorized modification” but doesn’t use the language you’d expect if it was an employee at the company. And we’re guessing that might have something to do with the fact that it wasn’t an employee necessarily, but the owner.

Musk’s AI chatbot Grok turned unrelated questions on several different issues back to an insistence that white genocide is ‘real.’ It was responding to a code manipulation said xAI