Elon Musk has said Grok, the A.I.-powered chatbot that his company developed, should be “politically neutral” and “maximally truth-seeking.”
But in practice, Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities.
Grok is similar to tools like ChatGPT, but it also lives on X, giving the social network’s users the opportunity to ask it questions by tagging it in posts.
One user on X asked Grok in July to identify the “biggest threat to Western civilization.” It responded that the greatest threat was “misinformation and disinformation.”
“Sorry for this idiotic response,” Mr. Musk groused on X after someone flagged Grok’s answer. “Will fix in the morning,” he said.
The next day, Mr. Musk published a new version of Grok that responded that the greatest threat was low “fertility rates” — an idea popular among conservative natalists that has transfixed Mr. Musk for years and something he has said motivated him to father at least 11 children….