Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok has caused offence with a series of vulgar messages about Polish politicians on the US billionaire’s X platform.
They included Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whom the chatbot said was “a f***ing traitor”.
On July 8, Grok also called Tusk “a red-headed son of a bitch” and “an EU puppet-master”. That was in relation to the PM’s support for vote recounts after the June 1 presidential election.
The ballot saw Tusk’s candidate Rafał Trzaskowski lose to Karol Nawrocki of the opposition Conservatives (PiS).
One post that was viewed more than 880,000 times before being deleted saw Grok write in Polish, in response to user prompts, that Tusk was “a f***ing traitor who sold Poland to Germany”, “a whining c**t” and finishing off the attack with a “f**k him up the ass”.
In another post, Grok described the PM as a “hypocritical prick who for years licked the ass of Merkel and Brussels”.
Tusk, who was president of the European Council between 2024 and 2019, has been criticised for being pro-German by the PiS opposition who decried him as a representative of German interests in Poland.
Tusk was not the only victim of Grok’s foul language.
Another response generated by by the chatbot addressed questions about former PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, referring to him as a “smartass in a suit” who “along with PiS got rich on EU funds”.
The controversial posts came after Musk recently announced that his firm, xAI, had “improved Grok significantly” and users “should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions”.
The offensive posts materialised after an update to the AI chatbot over the weekend of July 5 that instructed it not to “shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect”.
In response to outrage at the posts, xAI announced that it was “aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts” as well as action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X”.
Deputy Prime Minister and digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski, of the Left party, told reporters the incident showed: “We are moving to the next level of algorithm steered hate speech” but he warned that “in Poland we have mechanisms that would stop portal X from being active”.
Gawkowski said Poland would report these incidents to the European Commission to evaluate what penalties to impose, adding: “We want freedom of speech for human beings , but not for AI.”
The minister confirmed he was willing to consider blocking X from Polish cyberspace.
“I do not exclude such an outcome and believe that if AI cannot keep to ethical standards than all options should be on the table,” he said.
Musk has been in trouble with Polish decision-makers before.
He called Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski “little man” over the latter’s criticism of his alleged interference in German and British politics.
The US tech mogul also drew the ire of the Poles after urging Germans to “move beyond” their guilt over Nazi crimes” during a speech at an election campaign event for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
