Unhappy Elon Musk to cut 'left bias' out of Grok AI chatbot, says wants it 'politically neutral'

Billionaire Elon Musk has an AI startup venture called xAI, which has developed the Grok AI chatbot. It was announced on November 4, with Musk revealing that “Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!” Grok answers spicy questions that are often rejected by most other AI systems, and it does so with humour and wit, potentially matching Musk’s free speech ideology. While Musk’s AI venture has developed the conversational chatbot, it doesn’t share the same ideology or political leaning as the X chief, who leans to the right in his political beliefs.

Grok's political bias

Research scientist David Rozado recently shared a chart on X showing the Political Compass Test applied to Grok, and the findings might have come as a shock to Elon Musk. The chart shows Grok AI is even more left-leaning than OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT. It also suggests that the AI chatbot has a more Libertarian view of the society. On the Political Spectrum Quiz, Grok was found to have a “left moderate social libertarian” compass.

Could this mean that the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI might have been affected by what Musk calls a “woke mind virus”?

After revealing the results of the compass test, the researcher was contacted by engineers at X. Rozado posted, “Within minutes of me publishing the results of Grok on the political compass test, xAI tech leader @ibab_ml was reaching out to me with methodological questions and genuine interest on improving Grok. Within an hour @elonmusk was announcing immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutrality. What a dedicated team... No doubt @grok has a bright future ahead. Hat tip to the @TheRabbitHole84 and the X platform for enabling this sort of information flow between ordinary citizens and influential institutions.”

Shortly after the results were published, Musk promised “immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”