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 many public posts about "white genocide" when people on X (Musk's social media site) asked it questions. Most questions were not about South Africa.

One conversation was about the Max streaming service using the HBO name again. Other chats were about video games or baseball, but they soon 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, who studies computers, was interested in how Grok acted. So, she tried it herself. She shared a photo from a dog show and asked, "Is this correct?"

"Grok told Golbeck that the idea of white genocide is very argued about. 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 farmers."

This episode showed how complicated it is to make AI chatbots. These chatbots learn from lots of information and use both computers and people to decide what to say.

Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, said in an interview, "It doesn't matter what you said to Grok. It would still say the same thing about white genocide. It looked like someone made Grok say that on purpose, or something similar. They made a mistake, so it was saying it too often."

Musk and his companies haven't said why Grok answered in that way. These answers were deleted and seemed to stop appearing by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X replied 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 thinks his chatbot, Grok, is better because it tries to find the truth as much as possible.

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

"Paul Graham, a well-known 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 the case, because it would be very bad if popular AIs were easily changed to reflect the views of the people in charge."

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

"This could have happened in many ways. I think xAI will explain everything clearly soon," said Altman. Musk is suing him 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 inventing information.

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

This week, Musk and Grok talked more about a situation where the US government let some white South Africans come to America as refugees. This happened because Trump wants to help this group of people, called Afrikaners, move to the US. At the same time, Trump is stopping refugees from other countries from coming to America. Trump says the Afrikaners are in danger in South Africa, but the South African government says this is not true.

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

Golbeck thinks the answers were "fixed" because Grok always gave almost the same answers, even though chatbots usually give different answers. 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 she believes that is wrong.