Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI and popularized by social media platform X, appears to be repeatedly spreading misinformation about today’s mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia.
Gizmodo pointed to numerous posts that misidentified the bystander with whom Grok disarmed one of the gunmen – 43-year-old Ahmed Al-Ahmed – and 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 brought up unrelated information about the Israeli military’s treatment of Palestinians. Another post claimed that the person who actually disarmed the gunman was a “43-year-old IT professional and senior solutions architect” named Edward Crabtree.
Grok seems to have fixed some of the mistakes. At least one post that purportedly claimed a video of the shooting actually indicated that Cyclone Alfred had been revised “upon re-evaluation.”
The chatbot then confirmed Al Ahmed’s identity, writing that “the misunderstanding arose from a viral post that incorrectly identified him as Edward Crabtree, possibly due to a reporting error or a joke referencing a fictitious person.” (The article in question was published on a barely functional news site that may have been generated by AI.)
