Earlier this week, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence bot, called Grok, began answering entirely unrelated questions on X with a discussion of “white genocide” in Musk’s native South Africa.

On Wednesday, the world was a bit perplexed by the Grok LLM's sudden insistence on turning practically every response toward the topic of alleged "white genocide" in South Africa. xAI now says that odd behavior was the result of "an unauthorized modification" to the Grok system prompt—the core set of directions for how the LLM should behave.