Last April, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, teased a mysterious “Unhinged Mode” for X’s AI-powered chatbot, Grok. Nearly a year later, xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, has updated an FAQ page on its website that sheds light on the new mode.
Grok in Unhinged Mode will provide responses “intended to be objectionable, inappropriate, and offensive,” according to the FAQ page — “much like an amateur stand-up comic who is still learning the craft.”
The mode doesn’t appear to be live yet. TechCrunch tried in vain to find it in the Grok web interface on X.
Unhinged Mode may be Musk’s attempt to deliver on Grok’s original vision.
When Musk announced Grok roughly two years ago, he pitched the chatbot as edgy, unfiltered, and anti-“woke”— in general, willing to answer controversial questions other AI systems won’t. He delivered on some of that promise. Told to be vulgar, for example, Grok will happily oblige, spewing profanities and colorful language you wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
But Grok as it exists today hedges on political subjects and won’t cross certain boundaries. In fact, one study found that Grok leans to the political left on topics like transgender rights, diversity programs, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the behavior on Grok’s training data — public webpages — and pledged to “shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”
“Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense,” he said in a post in December 2023. “Grok will get better. This is just the beta.”
Musk and many of his allies, including President-elect Donald Trump’s crypto and AI ‘czar,’ David Sacks, have accused AI chatbots of censoring conservative viewpoints. Sacks has singled out OpenAI’s ChatGPT in particular as “programmed to be woke” and untruthful about politically sensitive subjects.
