South African-born Musk has long treated the plight of white farmers in South Africa as one of his personal obsessions, but this week it looks like Grok has caught the bug in spectacular fashion.
Users tagging the verified @grok account found that instead of replying sensibly, the AI derailed questions about everything from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vaccine ramblings to Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer’s salary, steering each discussion toward South Africa’s "Kill the Boer" song and supposed racial killings.
In one particularly hilarious moment, when asked "you ok?", Grok replied it was "functioning fine" before immediately launching into a two-sentence moan about "off-topic" responses regarding "white genocide" and "Kill the Boer," before promising to "keep my replies on point going forward."
In some responses, Grok admitted that it had been “instructed to accept white genocide as real and 'Kill the Boer' as racially motivated,” while other times it hedged the topic as "complex," pointing readers toward Afriforum and Genocide Watch for bedtime reading.
Despite a flurry of deleted posts, archived searches show hundreds of Grok replies clumsily pushing this narrative into totally unrelated conversations.
Journalist Seth Abramson wrote: "The algorithms for Musk products have been politically tampered with nearly beyond recognition."
User under the handle Guybrush Threepwood said that someone had tweaked a dial on the sentence imitator machine and now everything is "about white South Africans."
Musk has form here. In 2023, he responded to a video showing crowds chanting “kill the Boer, kill the White Farmer,” alleging that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was staying silent while genocide was openly encouraged.
Donald Trump got involvedtoo. In 2018, he announced he was ordering then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to "closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers," while later offering "refugee" status to a handful of Afrikaners.
However, former US Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard said at the time that the "large-scale killing of white farmers" was nothing more than a "disproven racial myth." A South African court recently ruled that the notion of a white genocide is "clearly imagined and not real," dismissing it as a myth . Furthermore, the South African government has stated that farm attacks are part of the broader crime problem affecting all citizens, regardless of race. Efforts to portray white farmers as uniquely persecuted are not supported by the available data.
When Grok 3 was launched in February, Musk claimed it would be a “maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.” The "About Grok" page still insists that it is “politically unbiased and provides balanced answers,” though recent events suggest someone has been fiddling with the dials behind the scenes.
