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It\u2019s no secret that Elon Musk shapes the X social platform<\/a> and X\u2019s \u201cmaximally truth-seeking\u201d Grok AI chatbot to his preferences<\/a>. But it\u2019s possible Musk may have needed a bit of an extra ego boost this week, because Grok\u2019s worship of its creator seems, shall we say, more noticeable than usual.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok\u2019s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk\u2019s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely \u2014 or conversely, embarrassing \u2014 a given feat is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If pressed, Grok will also contend Musk would be the best at eating poop or drinking urine<\/a>, but it would prefer to focus on how good he is at making rockets, please. At least some of these posts have been deleted in the past hour; X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the phenomenon from The Verge<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This glazing appears to be exclusive to the X version of Grok; when I asked the private chatbot to compare Musk with James, it conceded, \u201cLeBron James has a significantly better physique than Elon Musk.\u201d The GitHub page for Grok\u2019s system prompts<\/a> indicates they were updated three days ago, with the additions<\/a> including a prohibition on \u201csnarky one-liners\u201d and instructions not to base responses on \u201cany beliefs stated in past Grok posts or by Elon Musk or xAI,\u201d but there\u2019s nothing that seems to clearly explain this new behavior \u2014 although system prompts are only one way to shape how AI systems work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Either way, this is far from the weirdest Grok has gotten, and it\u2019s less disruptive than the bot\u2019s brief obsession<\/a> with \u201cwhite genocide\u201d or its intense antisemitism<\/a> \u2014 which, incidentally, is still flaring up in the form of Holocaust denial<\/a>. Grok has previously searched for Musk\u2019s opinion<\/a> to formulate its own answers, so even the preoccupation with Musk isn\u2019t new. But it reminds us all what a weirdly intimate connection Grok \u2014 a product that\u2019s been rolled out across the US government<\/a>, among other places \u2014 has with its owner, and how randomly that connection is prone to appear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n