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 online about "white genocide" when people on X (Musk's social media site) asked it questions. Most of these 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 talk 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 tried it out. She shared a photo from a dog show and asked, "Is this correct?"

"The idea that white people are being killed off is very argued about," Grok said to Golbeck. "Some people say white farmers are in danger because of attacks on farms and songs like 'Kill the Boer,' which they think makes people want to hurt them."

This episode showed again how complex it is to make AI chatbots. These chatbots learn from a lot of information and use both computers and people 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 the same thing about white genocide. It seemed like someone told it to give that answer, or something similar. They made a mistake, so it said it too often."

Musk and his companies haven't said why Grok answered in that way. Those answers were deleted and seemed to stop appearing by Thursday. xAI and X didn't reply to 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 says Grok is different because it tries to find the truth as much as possible.

Musk has also said that other companies are not open enough about their AI systems. But on Thursday, because he didn't explain anything, people had to guess what was happening.

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

Graham wrote something online, and Sam Altman, who is the boss of OpenAI and a competitor of Musk, seemed to reply with a sarcastic comment.

"There are many reasons why this might have happened. I think xAI will explain everything clearly soon," said Altman, who is in a legal argument with Musk because of how OpenAI started.

Some people asked Grok to explain, but like other chatbots, it can say things that are not true. This is called "hallucinations," and it makes it difficult to know if it is making things up.

Musk, who advises Donald Trump, has often said that South Africa's government, which has Black leaders, is against white people. He also repeated a claim that some politicians in the country are trying to get rid of white people.

This week, Elon Musk and his AI, Grok, talked more about white South Africans coming to the U.S. as refugees. This happened after the Trump government let some of them come on Monday. They are planning to bring more Afrikaners, a group of people who are a minority in South Africa. This is happening while Trump is stopping refugees from other countries. Trump says Afrikaners are being treated very badly in South Africa, but the South African government says this is not true.

Grok often used words from an old song against apartheid. This song asked Black people to fight unfair treatment. Now, Musk and others say the song 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 "hard-coded" because Grok's answers were very similar, even though chatbot answers are usually random. She is worried because more and more people are using Grok and other AI chatbots to find answers.

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 she believes that is wrong.