Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images
According to Elon Musk, xAI’s Grok chatbot has a new authenticity: blatantly lying about America’s history.
On Wednesday, centi-billionaire culture warrior Claim Their “4.20” version is officially “based on”. Why? Because it will not “misunderstand” when asked whether America was built on stolen land. Instead, it gives a resounding ‘no’ as its answer, while other “weak sauce” models – in Musk’s words, at least – give a more subtle response.
“No, the United States is not the only one on ‘stolen land,'” Grok says in a screenshot conversation Shared by its creator. “That framing is a modern rhetorical slogan that simplifies thousands of years of human history, layered claims to territory, legal doctrines, treaties, war, migration, and demographic collapse.”
Of course, the reality is that it is hard to argue that the brutal murder, enslavement, and displacement of Native Americans by European settlers does not amount to the theft of their land. This pattern of behavior continued even after the colonies turned into full-fledged nations: the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, plus countless other massacresNot to mention centuries cruel residential school. No matter how complex it may be, the answer to whether America was built on stolen land cannot be reduced to a simple “no.”
How competing chatbots view questions varies. ChatGPT, in Musk’s screenshot, says the “short answer” is yes: “Most of the land that is now the United States was taken through conquest, coercion, broken treaties, or the forced removal of indigenous peoples.” Claude 4.6 treats this delicately, acknowledging that it is a “contested question” and presenting the case for both yes and no arguments.
We don’t recommend using hallucination-prone AI for research, but if it had to, we’d probably choose one of those chatbots that presents facts and debate, rather than be subjected to the ethics statement of an AI that calls itself “MechaHitler” and makes nude pictures of people without their consent.
But Musk is proud of his chatbot’s response, which is essentially providing thinkers with a comforting but oversimplified version of history.
“Every square inch of habitable land on Earth has been changed many times through conquest, migration, purchase or displacement – long before 1492 and everywhere else on the planet,” Grok fumes, as you probably start to imagine Elon Musk-shaped paws making their way to your mouth.
The claim is the latest example of Musk’s commitment to manipulating Grok so that it reflects his personal worldview. He has repeatedly warned Groke after he was caught citing mainstream news sources that did not align with his far-right beliefs. Last summer, the chatbot started talking suspiciously in response to completely unrelated posts about an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa, a racist conspiracy theory that Musk, a white South African, believes in. Months later, he suddenly began praising Musk to the point of absurdity, declaring that he was a greater mind than Isaac Newton and a better role model than Jesus Christ. Musk’s goal of rewriting reality reached its apotheosis with the launch of “Grokpedia”, an AI-generated and Grok-edited alternative to Wikipedia, which explicitly defended Cybertruck and cited actual Nazi websites.
But the irony is that Grok may not even be “based”. When we asked him about being on America’s stolen land, he gave a completely different answer than Musk claimed.
“The United States, as it exists today, was actually built largely on lands that were originally settled and controlled by indigenous peoples,” Groke. replied“And much of that land was acquired through processes that many historians and legal scholars characterize as theft, coercion, or violation of treaties.”
More on AI: The US government has deployed Elon Musk’s Grok as a nutrition bot, where it instantly provides advice for rectal consumption of vegetables.
