Grok offends again: Türkiye to probe Elon Musk-owned chatbot's alleged insults of President Tayyip Erdoğan

A Turkish court on Wednesday blocked access to some content from Grok, an xAI chatbot integrated with Elon Musk-owned X, after authorities claimed that it had generated responses insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as the statesman and founder of the Republic of Türkiye Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It was also said to have attacked religious values.

This led to the office of Ankara's chief prosecutor filing an order imposing restrictions using the country's internet laws, on grounds of a possible threat to public order.

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A formal investigation has also been launched into the chatbot's operations, as a result of which a full-access ban on the application may also be enforced if the offensive responses continue, a Daily Sabah report said.

A criminal court approved the request early on Wednesday, ordering the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) to enforce the content ban.

This is the first official probe into a chatbot in Türkiye since the launch of ChatGPT. The nations has also become the first to “impose censorship on Grok”, explained Yaman Akdeniz, a cyber law expert at the Istanbul Bilgi University, in an X post.

The rise in Grok's unfiltered responses come earlier this month, after Musk promised that Grok had been upgraded “significantly”, and that there would be a difference in its responses.

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Over the past few days, xAI has also had to now delete posts that Grok made on X, some of which praised Adolf Hitler, while the others were antisemitic or morbid.

In general, concerns over political bias, hate speech, and factual inaccuracies have risen since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022—the first major chatbot to be released that gained international popularity.

Middle East