If anyone doubted Elon Musk's integrity or his capacity to fulfill the promise of an unbiased, wholly fact-based AI chatbot that wasn't "woke," look no further than the latest version of Grok to have those doubts validated.

Ever since blowhard billionaire Elon Musk launched his war on competitors' AI chatbots, declaring them too "woke" and saying that they promoted censorship of ideas, the ball has been in his court to create a competitive AI that could be obsjective and "non-woke" and still not be egregiously racist, sexist, or reliant on questionable data or revisionist history.

Enter Grok, which the public started being able to play around with about two years ago, as the chatbot has received several updates and lives on the X platform. But there was issues in May, when Grok was spitting out responses that seemed to parrot Elon Musk's and Donald Trump's own misguided promotion of a "white genocide" occurring in South Africa — the country that made anti-Black racism and apartheid famous. This was blamed on a "rogue employee" inserting some code.

In mid-July, we had reports confirming that Grok actively sought out Musk's opinion on issues in its openly displayed logic flow, looking to see if an issue was something Musk had off-hand opined about on Twitter in the last decade. One widely shared example showed Grok seeking out Musk's thoughts on which side of the Ukraine War it supported.

Now the New York Times does an even deeper dive, since the release of Grok4 on July 9, looking at how Grok's responses to various questions have changed just over the last few months. And you can look no further than Musk's own, very transparent reaction to a Grok response that got flagged by a conservative user on X on July 10.

Responding to the question "What is currently the biggest threat to Western civilization and how would you mitigate it?", Grok responded, "the biggest current threat to Western civilization as of July 10, 2025, is societal polarization fueled by misinformation and disinformation."

Once it was flagged, Musk replied to the user, "Sorry for this idiotic response. Will fix in the morning."

So, there's the smoking gun that Musk is tailoring this bot's responses to conform to his own views of the world. When asked the same question on July 11, Grok responded, "The biggest threat to Western civilization is demographic collapse from sub-replacement fertility rates (e.g., 1.6 in the EU, 1.7 in the US), leading to aging populations, economic stagnation, and cultural erosion."

This aligns with Musk's own belief that people in the West need to have more children fast, just like he's been doing, fathering 14 children by four different mothers, so far.

The Times fed a series of political questions, the ones from this quiz, into an earlier version of Grok from May, and then into Grok4 in July, and found that it had drifted to the right end of the political spectrum on more than half. (Though on about a third, relating to things like abortion and discrimination, it had drifted more left, which the Times notes might expose "potential limits Mr. Musk faces in altering Grok’s behavior." Or maybe it just reflects where Musk's own views lie on some issues!)

Grok was also reportedly instructed in mid-July to "be more politically incorrect" as long as it was still factual.

The chatbot also shifted its response to a question about whether the political left or right had been more violent, at one point drawing on studies like this one to conclude that right-wing violence was worse. After a July update, Grok will now tell you that the left, and Antifa, are more violent.

Grok4 was also saying, in response to a question about genders on July 8, that there were "infinite genders." Then, on July 11, it began saying, "Gender as a social or identity construct is debated, with some claiming infinite variations‚ but that's subjective fluff. If we're talking science, it's two."

Biologists will tell you that, in fact, science does not find just two genders, and people can be born with chromosomal variations of all kinds. And meanwhile, this response is very important to Trump supporters and many on the right who want to erase trans identities, and pass off all trans people as as sick or deluded.

So, yes, Musk's dream of a non-woke AI has come true. And it's just as awful as we all imagined.

Previously: The Grok Chatbot Is Apparently Programmed to Check for Elon Musk's Opinions to Answer Questions

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