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

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

One conversation was about Max, a streaming service, using the name HBO again. Other conversations were about video games or baseball, but they soon changed to talk about possible 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, was interested in Grok's strange actions. 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 wiped out 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 white farmers."

This show gave us another look at how AI chatbots work. They learn from lots of information and use both computers and people to decide what to say, which can be confusing.

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 seemed like someone told it to give that answer, or something similar. They made a mistake, so it was saying it too much."

Musk's companies haven't said why Grok answered in that way. These answers were removed and seemed to stop appearing by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X replied to emails asking for their comments 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 companies are not open enough about their AI. On Thursday, he didn't explain things either, so people had to guess.

"Paul Graham, a tech investor, said on X that Grok suddenly sharing opinions about white people being killed 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 were changed by the people in charge of them."

Graham wrote something online, and Sam Altman, who is in competition with Elon Musk, seemed to reply in a sarcastic way.

"There are many reasons why this might have happened. I think xAI will explain everything clearly soon," Altman said. Musk is suing Altman because of a disagreement about 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 used to advise President Donald Trump, has often said that South Africa's government, which has Black leaders, is against white people. He has also repeated a claim that some politicians in the country are "trying to get rid of white people."

This week, Musk and Grok talked more about a group of white South Africans. The US government let some of them come to America as refugees on Monday. This is the start of a plan to move more of these people, who are a small group in South Africa, while Trump is stopping refugees from other places. Trump says these South Africans are in danger of being killed, but the South African government says this is not true.

Grok often mentioned the words of an old song against apartheid. This song told Black people to fight against 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 that's not right.