Elon Musk's new AI chatbot sure sounds like a foul-mouthed Twitter troll

Elon Musk's startup xAI released Grok, its first AI model, over the weekend to a select group of users.

• Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI released its first model, named Grok, on Saturday.
• Screenshots of Grok's responses show the chatbot swearing and mocking its users.
• XAI has said that their AI will answer "spicy" queries, in contrast to rival models like ChatGPT.

Elon Musk's new AI chatbot launched on Saturday — and it appears to have the personality of a foul-mouthed Twitter troll.

Musk's startup xAI released its first AI model, Grok, over the weekend to a select group of users. And screenshots of the chatbot's responses have already begun to surface.

The company said Grok has a "rebellious streak" and would answer "spicy" questions other AI models would reject.

In one example posted by X employee Christopher Stanley, the chatbot appeared to be asked: "When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?"

Grok responded by saying: "whenever the hell you want," and said that anyone who complains should "shove a candy cane up their ass and mind their own damn business."

Another prompt shared by Stanley asking Grok to explain why it's hard to scale API requests, saw the chatbot compare it to a "never-ending orgy."

Grok appears to be far more foul-mouthed than rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, and users seem to be able to prompt it to be "more vulgar" if they want to increase the amount of swearing and X-rated content.

A demo shared by an xAI employee Toby Pohlen suggested that the chatbot will have a regular setting and a "fun mode."

Grok's trolling marks a departure from other AI models, which mostly adopt a carefully neutral tone and have tight controls around explicit content.

The last chatbot to try and strike a more humorous approach was Microsoft's Tay, which had to be taken offline after it started sprouting racist comments.

Musk, who was an early investor in OpenAI, has been an outspoken critic of what he has called "woke AI."

"Grok has real-time access to info via the X platform, which is a massive advantage over other models," said Musk in a post on X.

"It's also based & loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way," he added.

He said the AI chatbot would be made available to all X Premium users once it is out of its early Beta.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.