Elon Musk’s AI Grok chatbot has been bringing up ‘white genocide’ in unrelated chats on X, sparking concern about how conspiracy theories could easily be spread.

On Wednesday users of X (formerly Twitter) posed innocuous questions to the platform’s AI chatbot Grok.

The questions ranged from baseball players to building scaffolding, with one user even asking Grok to talk like a pirate.

The bot not only replied to these questions, but also added unrelated information about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa.

For instance, an X user asked Grok “is this true” concerning a post from New York Magazine about the romantic relationships of actors in the film series Pitch Perfect.

Grok responded: “The claim of white genocide in South Africa is highly contentious. Some, like Afriforum [local lobby group for Afrikaner interests], report farm attacks as evidence of targeted violence, citing 49 murders in 2023. Others, including courts and officials, dismiss it as a myth, noting these are part of broader...