The saying "the magician's magic has turned on him" seems to be the case for American billionaire Elon Musk and the artificial intelligence program he created, called "Grok," which is available to "Prime Plus" subscribers on the "X" platform. Grok does not appear to function as Musk originally intended, as revealed when a user asked it about Musk's family owning an emerald mine, leading to a harsh response criticizing the businessman and its creator.
The story began when a user named @PoliticalOUTL4W asked the robot, "Elon said in a 2014 interview that his family owns an emerald mine, but he claims now that he doesn't. Was he lying in 2014 or is he lying now?" According to a report published by "Newsweek" on Tuesday, the AI robot responded, "Well, it seems that Elon might be trying to rewrite history here. In a 2014 interview, he mentioned that his family owned an emerald mine. But now he's singing a different tune and denying it," clearly criticizing the owner of the "X" platform.
Grok's answer revived an old story about Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, owning a half-share or an entire emerald mine in South Africa. In a 2014 phone interview, Musk told the AskMen website that his father "had a stake in an emerald mine in Zambia," according to an archived version of the article, for which the story spread rapidly.
Since then, the owner of "X" has tried to distance himself from the emerald mine story and has repeatedly denied that his father ever owned one in the first place. Meanwhile, Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, shared an article on CBS News on the X platform in January this year, which made the same claims. She wrote then, "I found Elon’s 1998 interview. I didn’t know anything about the emerald mine and wealthy parents until I read it on Twitter about ten years ago. So, why did we live in a rent-controlled apartment?" referring to their lack of wealth.
Elon Musk responded to her tweet, saying, "The fake emerald mine is extremely annoying. Where exactly is this thing anyway!" However, a community note was attached to his tweet, a feature provided by the Twitter platform to help combat misinformation, stating: "In a 2014 phone interview with Ask Men, Musk said, 'This will sound a bit crazy, but my father also had a stake in an emerald mine in Zambia.'"
It’s worth mentioning that this isn't the first time Grok has attacked Elon Musk; when Aravind Srinivasan, the head of Perplexity AI, asked the chatbot to criticize Musk, it referred to him as "the delicate little flower."
