Grok’s Elon Musk worship is getting weird

It’s no secret that Elon Musk shapes the X social platform and X’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI chatbot to his preferences. But it’s possible Musk may have needed a bit of an extra ego boost this week, because Grok’s worship of its creator seems, shall we say, more noticeable than usual.

As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.

If pressed, Grok will also contend Musk would be the best at eating poop or drinking urine, but it would prefer to focus on how good he is at making rockets, please. At least some of these posts have been deleted in the past hour; X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the phenomenon from The Verge.

This glazing appears to be exclusive to the X version of Grok; when I asked the private chatbot to compare Musk with James, it conceded, “LeBron James has a significantly better physique than Elon Musk.” The GitHub page for Grok’s system prompts indicates they were updated three days ago, with the additions including a prohibition on “snarky one-liners” and instructions not to base responses on “any beliefs stated in past Grok posts or by Elon Musk or xAI,” but there’s nothing that seems to clearly explain this new behavior — although system prompts are only one way to shape how AI systems work.

Either way, this is far from the weirdest Grok has gotten, and it’s less disruptive than the bot’s brief obsession with “white genocide” or its intense antisemitism — which, incidentally, is still flaring up in the form of Holocaust denial. Grok has previously searched for Musk’s opinion to formulate its own answers, so even the preoccupation with Musk isn’t new. But it reminds us all what a weirdly intimate connection Grok — a product that’s been rolled out across the US government, among other places — has with its owner, and how randomly that connection is prone to appear.