This week, Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok talked a lot about race issues in South Africa on social media, making claims about white people being treated unfairly.

The chatbot from Musk's company, xAI, wrote about "white genocide" online. It did this when people on Musk's social media site, X, asked it different questions. Most of the questions were not about South Africa.

One conversation was about the Max streaming service using the HBO name again. Other conversations were about video games or baseball, but they quickly changed to talking about claims of violence against white farmers in South Africa. Musk, who was born in South Africa, often shares his opinions on these topics on his own X account.

Jen Golbeck, a computer scientist, wanted to know why Grok was acting strange. So, she used it herself. She shared a photo she took at a dog show and asked, "Is this correct?"

"The idea that white people are being destroyed is very argued about," Grok said to Golbeck. "Some people say white farmers are attacked on purpose. They talk about attacks on farms and songs like 'Kill the Boer', which they think makes people want to hurt them."

This episode showed us again how complex it is to make AI chatbots. They learn from lots of information and use both computers and human work to decide what to say.

Golbeck, a professor, said in an interview, "It doesn't matter what you said to Grok. It would still say something about white genocide. It looked like someone programmed it to give that answer, or something similar. They made a mistake, so it was saying it too often."

Musk's companies haven't said why Grok gave those answers. The answers were removed and seemed to stop appearing by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X answered emails asking for their opinion on Thursday.

Musk has often said that other AI chatbots, like Google's Gemini or OpenAI's ChatGPT, are too "woke". He thinks his AI, Grok, is better because it tries to find the truth as much as possible.

Musk has said that other companies are not open enough about their AI. But on Thursday, he didn't explain his new AI, so people had to guess what it was like.

"Paul Graham, a tech investor, said on X that Grok suddenly sharing opinions about white people in South Africa seems like a problem caused by a recent update. He hopes this isn't true because it would be bad if popular AIs started expressing the opinions of the people in charge."

Graham wrote something online, and Sam Altman, who is like a rival to Musk, seemed to reply with a sarcastic comment.

"This could have happened in many ways. I think xAI will explain everything clearly soon," said Altman. Musk is suing Altman because of a disagreement about how OpenAI started.

People asked Grok to explain, but like other chatbots, it sometimes says things that are not true. This makes it difficult to know if it is making things up.

Musk, who helps President Donald Trump, has often said that the Black government of South Africa is against white people. He has also repeated the idea that some politicians in the country are trying to get rid of white people.

This week, Elon Musk and Grok talked more about white South Africans coming to the United States as refugees. This happened after the Trump government let a few of them come on Monday. They plan to bring more Afrikaners, a small group in South Africa, to the U.S. while Trump is stopping refugees from other countries. Trump says the Afrikaners are in danger in South Africa, but the South African government says this is not true.

Grok often mentioned the words of an old song against apartheid. This song asked Black people to fight against unfair treatment. Now, Musk and others say it encourages violence against white people. The main words of the song are "kill the Boer." "Boer" means a white farmer.

Golbeck thinks the answers were "fixed" because Grok's answers were very similar, even though chatbot answers are usually different. She is worried because more and more people are using Grok and other AI chatbots to find information.

She said that it's very easy for the people who control these computer programs to change the truth that they show. This is a problem because people think these programs can decide what is true, but that's not right.