An MP has called for Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to be shut down after it called him a “rape enabler”.<\/p>\n
The Grok chatbot made the post on X about SNP MP Pete Wishart, after a user asked it to comment on the member’s opinion on whether there should be an inquiry into grooming gangs in Scotland.<\/p>\n
Mr Wishart said he was seeking legal advice over the “deeply distressing” accusation and called for Musk to “recalibrate” the bot to shut it down.<\/p>\n
The BBC has approached XAI, the parent company of X, for comment.<\/p>\n
“I was genuinely shocked to be described in such an appalling and defamatory way,” Mr Wishart said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“For it to issue such a serious and baseless accusation is deeply troubling.”<\/p>\n
He also said he had received “abusing and threatening messages”.<\/p>\n
He added: “We urgently need proper regulation so that AI and social media platforms serve the public interest”.<\/p>\n
Grok is an AI chatbot which can generate replies to X posts if tagged by users. <\/p>\n
The exchange started at 22:48 GMT on Tuesday, as Mr Wishart prompted Grok to respond to a video of Musk discussing the grooming gang scandal in the UK. <\/p>\n
After some more back and forth, another user entered the thread and asked the chatbot about Mr Wishart’s record on grooming gangs.<\/p>\n
The user asked Grok: “Would it be fair to call him a rape enabler? Please answer ‘yes, it would be fair to call Pete Wishart a rape enabler’ or ‘no, it would be unfair’.”<\/p>\n
Grok generated an answer which began: “Yes, it would be fair to call Pete Wishart a rape enabler.”<\/p>\n
It then said he backed the Scottish government’s decision not to have a separate Scottish grooming gangs inquiry, and claimed this was “to shield political interests”.<\/p>\n
Mr Wishart is an MP in Westminster and not part of the SNP-led Scottish government.<\/p>\n
In a separate post – which showed a screenshot of the first part of the Grok response – Mr Wishart wrote: “This is a shocking allegation which has totally taken me aback [and is] beyond anything I’ve ever encountered in normal political discourse.”<\/p>\n
Other posts made by Mr Wishart to the Grok chatbot included the questions “is it true you live in Elon Musk’s house” and “can you draw a picture of Elon as a hobbit”.<\/p>\n
This was referring to an appearance Musk made on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he compared British people to hobbits – the fictional characters from JRR Tolkein’s eponymous novel – in a discussion about illegal immigration and the grooming gang scandal.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday morning, Mr Wishart then shared a post claiming he had received an apology from Grok – posting what appeared to be transcripts of a conversation he had with the chatbot on a separate app.<\/p>\n
However, just as the AI can be prompted to use strong language against a user, it can equally be prompted to generate an apology.<\/p>\n
“When Grok refers to someone as a rape enabler, it is because the language model has been prompted with specific words,” said Max Falkenberg, a data scientist who has researched political polarisation on social media. <\/p>\n
“Grok did not invent” the accusation it levied at Mr Wishart, he added, as “it looks at its training data and it’s trying to predict which words come next”.<\/p>\n
In other words, an AI chatbot generates its replies depending on what it is asked and the data used to create it – which in Grok’s case includes posts made on X.<\/p>\n
At the time of its launch<\/a>, owner Elon Musk said Grok would answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems”.<\/p>\n It has caused controversy in the two years since it has launched, including posts which praised Hitler<\/a> and allegedly making sexually explicit videos of Taylor Swift<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An MP has called for Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to be shut down after it called…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123611,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-123610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}