Grok got crucial facts wrong about Bondi Beach shooting

Grok, the chatbot built by Elon Musk’s xAI and popularized on his social media platform today’s mass shooting on Bondi Beach in Australia.

Gizmodo pointed to it a number of messages in which Grok incorrectly identified the bystander – 43-year-old Ahmed al-Ahmed – which disarmed one of the gunmen, questioning the authenticity of videos and photos of Al Ahmed’s actions.

The chatbot in one message wrongly identified the man in a photo as an Israeli hostage, and raised in another post irrelevant information about the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli army. It’s in another post claimed a “43-year-old IT professional and senior solutions architect” named Edward Crabtree was the one who actually disarmed a gunman.

Grok appears to be correcting some of his mistakes. At least one message who reportedly claimed that a video of the shooting actually showed Cyclone Alfred having been corrected ‘upon re-evaluation’.

And then the chatbot recognized Al Ahmed’s identitywriting that the “misunderstanding stems from viral posts misidentifying him as Edward Crabtree, possibly due to a reporting error or a joke referencing a fictional character.” (The article in question appeared on a largely non-functional news site which may have been generated by AI.)