A bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to Elon Musk on Tuesday over antisemitic language spewed by his AI platform Grok on the social media platform X, which he also owns, Axios reported Tuesday.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Ok., and Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., were among the more than a dozen lawmakers who criticized Musk for not taking "reasonable measures" to mitigate the chatbot's use of antisemitic tropes and phrases, praise for Adolf Hitler, and Holocaust denialism, Axios reported.
"xAI's failure to take reasonable measures to mitigate against its AI models from engaging in hate speech is reckless, unacceptable, and antisemitic," the lawmakers wrote in the letter obtained by Axios.
Musk addressed the backlash generated by Grok earlier this month.
"Grok was too compliant to user prompts," Musk wrote in a post to X on July 9. "Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed."
xAI announced the same day it would take down inappropriate posts made by Grok.
"We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts," the Grok account posted. "Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X."
However, the mitigation efforts have fallen short for Lankford, who wrote the letter with Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.
They were joined by Democrat cosigners Sens. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Georgia's Jon Ossoff, Elissa Slotkin, and Gary Peters of Michigan, New Hampshire's Maggie Hassan, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, New Mexico's Ben Ray Lujan, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Hawaii's Brian Schatz, according to the report.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.