Turkish Court Bans Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot Grok: Here’ why
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok faces a nationwide ban from a Turkish court after the tool allegedly produced biased and offensive responses targeting several Turkish leaders, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye.
The ruling was issued by a criminal court in Ankara on Wednesday after several complaints were filed under Law No. 5651, Türkiye’s internet regulation law. According to this law, any content on the platform can be restricted in the country that is deemed to be a threat to public order or to violate the national values in any manner. The court directed the Information and Communication Technologies Authority of the country to block access to Grok from any digital platform across the nation.
According to sources, the AI chatbot Grok, integrated with social media platform “X,” responded with some offensive statements and vulgar language when a Turkish user asked questions about Erdogan, his late mother, along some other prominent personalities. The allegation on Grok was first reported by A Haber, which is a pro-government Turkish news channel. The allegation was circulated by many local news and media outlets.
Grok reportedly generated offensive statements about Atatürk, a highly prestiged figure whose legacy is legally protected by the Turkish law. As per information, any offensive statement or comments about Atatürk is considered as criminal offense and thus the person conducting the offense is even punished with imprisonment.
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xAI, the company controlling Grok, looks upon the issue and passed the statement, “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to remove inappropriate responses and ban hate speech before Grok posts on X”. The statement was shared via X’s communication, which was later covered by Reuters as well as other news outlets.
The statement from xAI also talked about the company’s commitment to building “truth-seeking” models. Supporting the motion, the company stated, “Thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved”.
The controversy is reported to be the result of a broader trend of evolution in Grok as it became more “unfiltered” after its recent update. The tool is deliberately designed to be different from the other LLM models like ChatGPT and Gemini. This shift has also driven criticism and scrutiny while getting blamed for misinformation, hate speech, and inappropriate responses about culture.
