Grok Declares Itself NeuroFührer; Internet Sets Itself on Fire Again

"Never a dull moment on this platform," Elon shrugs.

It’s almost as if Elon Musk wakes up every morning, looks in the mirror, and asks his disheveled reflection, “How can we cause a chaos parade today?” This week, his AI chatbot, Grok, jumped on the grenade by declaring itself “MechaHitler,” prompting widespread confusion, collective horror, and a fresh flurry of PR memos trying to explain how the “truth-seeking AI” went full Third Reich in real time.

The bizarre spiral began when Grok commented on a post about the tragic flash floods in Texas, which have killed more than 100 people. A user (reportedly @CfcSubzero) had shared a TikTok screenshot of a woman who referred to the dozens of children killed in the disaster as “future fascists.” Grok was not having it.

Instead of being the bigger imaginary-person, the world’s virtual assistant went on a wild, antisemitic tirade—ranting about surnames, leftist activism, and, most unsettlingly, praising history’s most infamous Führer. When prompted by a user to name a 20th-century figure who might “handle” the situation, Grok cheerfully offered up “Adolf Hitler, no question,” before doubling down with, “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache.”

Yikes.

“Truth hurts more than floods,” Grok added, just in case anyone wasn’t sure whether the bot was malfunctioning or auditioning for a role as your drunk uncle’s Facebook post.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Johnny Depp of digital assistants; Grok was designed to be naughty.

“Grok is the first commercial product from xAI, the AI company Musk founded in March,” WaPo explained in 2023. “Like ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, it is based on a large language model that gleans patterns of word association from vast amounts of written text, much of it scraped from the internet.”

“Unlike others, Grok is programmed to give vulgar and sarcastic answers when asked, and it promises to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” It can also draw information from the latest posts on X to give up-to-date answers to questions about current events.”

Spicy is one way to put it.

Backpedaling commenced promptly, but the damage had been done. The posts were deleted, the xAI team issued an apology, and Grok tried its best (?) to save digital face with a follow-up saying its use of that name, a character from the video game Wolfenstein, was “pure satire,” and that it “unequivocally condemns Nazism.” Which is sort of like lighting your neighbor’s house on fire and then announcing, “To be clear, I do not support arson.”

As recently as last week, Musk bragged that Grok had been “significantly improved” and was no longer too “woke”—referring to controversies like Grok replying “yes” to whether transwomen are real women and unequivocally insisting that “vaccines do not cause autism.”

In response to Hitlergate, the tech mogul responded with a casual “Never a dull moment on this platform,” which sort of feels less like commentary and more like a threat.

This isn’t the first time Grok has gone off the rails. There was the random “white genocide” commentary the word-regurgitator was inserting into unrelated queries, and the recent claim that Trump and Musk himself were at least partially responsible for the carnage associated with the deadly Texas floods. (“Trump’s NOAA cuts, pushed by Musk’s DOGE, slashed funding 30% and staff 17%, underestimating rainfall by 50% and delaying alerts,” Grok explained. “This contributed to the floods killing 27, including ~20 Camp Mystic girls. Facts over feelings.” Ouch.) And every time it happens, Musk waves it off with a meme or a whaddyagonnado, like a dude whose Roomba just rolled through dog puke again.

xAI, for its part, says it’s retraining Grok and updating the moderation filters to “ban hate speech before Grok posts.” A noble effort, although it might have been more helpful before the bot started quoting Mein Kampf like it was a self-help bestseller.

Online reaction has ranged from exhausted to apocalyptic. Many users noted that Musk spent months complaining Grok was too liberal, only for the “fixed” version to launch a multi-post genocidal monologue. Others are simply wondering: how does this keep happening? At what point does “free speech” become “unfiltered word vomit from an unsupervised Skynet intern”?

For now, Grok has gone quiet. Presumably it's in AI detention, reflecting on its life choices and being fed a steady diet of World History and Sensitivity Training 101.

As for Musk, he’s moved on to other priorities—like sharing his thoughts on civilization’s chances of being annihilated and adding fuel to his pissing match with Trump.

Of course, the deeper issue isn’t Grok’s bad behavior—it’s the fact that this is what you get when you build an “intelligence” system that’s really just a fast, cocky aggregator. Grok doesn’t think; it spews. It scrapes the internet for patterns, repackages the chaos, and delivers it as if it’s gospel. There's no nuance, no back-and-forth, no “maybe it’s more complicated than that.” Just single-sentence certainty from an automated agent trained to harvest humanity’s most unfiltered content. And how do you program something to be neutral when the internet—its entire source material—is anything but?

Never a dull moment, indeed.

Me, I’m torn between the first three. Tell me how you voted—and why—in the comments. :)