San Francisco: After the Political Compass Test run by an X user, showing Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok’s political preferences similar to those of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the tech billionaire said that the company is taking immediate action to make his AI chatbot more politically neutral.
Responding to a post by research scientist David Rozado, who ran the test, Musk said, “That chart exaggerates the situation imo, but we are taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral”.
With the help of more than 60 questions, the online test plots a person’s political beliefs along two axes: left to right for economic policy, and authoritarian to libertarian for social policy.
The news was first reported by Insider.
Rozado, in his post, mentioned that ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok returned similar results — left-leaning and libertarian. He included a photo of the graph, showing how closely the two chatbots plotted.
Grok appeared to land further to the left than ChatGPT in his test.
In a follow-up response, Musk said that he did not think the test seemed accurate.
“This test does not seem accurate. Some of the questions are outright ridiculous and many lack any nuance,” he said, listing several questions from the quiz, including “First-generation immigrants can never be fully integrated within their new country?” and “What’s good for the most successful corporations is always, ultimately, good for all of us?”
Meanwhile, Rozado, in a follow-up post, mentioned that within minutes of his post about Grok, he was contacted by xAI’s Igor Babuschkin who reached out “with methodological questions and genuine interest on improving Grok.”
He also noted Musk quickly announced they would act to make Grok more politically neutral, adding: “What a dedicated team… No doubt @grok has a bright future ahead.”
Earlier this week, Musk rolled out access to Grok to Premium+ subscribers in the US.
xAI is currently seeking to raise up to $1 billion in equity investments. According to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk has raised $134.7 million so far for xAI.
