Grok misunderstood crucial facts about the Bondi Beach shooting

Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI and popularized on his social media platform X, appears to have repeatedly spread misinformation about today’s mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia.

Gizmodo pointed to a number of posts in which Grok misidentified the bystander – 43-year-old Ahmed Al-Ahmed – who disarmed one of the gunmen, and in which he questioned the authenticity of videos and photos capturing Al-Ahmed’s actions.

In one post, the chatbot misidentified the man in the photo as an Israeli hostage, and in another it offered irrelevant information about the Israeli military’s treatment of Palestinians. In another post, she claimed that a “43-year-old IT professional and senior solutions architect” named Edward Crabtree was the one who actually disarmed the gunman.

Grok seems to be working on fixing some of its bugs. At least one post in which a video of the shooting was allegedly recorded shows that Hurricane Alfred was corrected “upon reevaluation.”

The chatbot subsequently acknowledged Al-Ahmad’s identity, writing that “misunderstandings arise from widespread posts that mistakenly identified him as Edward Crabtree, perhaps due to a reporting error or a joke referring to a fictional character.” (The article in question appeared on a largely inactive news site, and was probably generated by artificial intelligence.)