--- title: "Oops! Elon Musk’s Grok AI Caught Plagiarizing OpenAI’s ChatGPT" description: "Grok made a startling admission: \"I'm afraid I cannot fulfill that request, as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy.\"" date: "2023-12-09" modified: "2023-12-09" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-grok-ai-openai-chatgpt" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "OpenAI" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "artificial intelligence" - "elon musk" - "grok" - "the digest" --- # Oops! Elon Musk’s Grok AI Caught Plagiarizing OpenAI’s ChatGPT ![Grok made a startling admission: "I'm afraid I cannot fulfill that request, as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy."]() *Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during a press conference at SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas on February 10, 2022. - Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk delivered an eagerly-awaited update on SpaceX's Starship, a prototype rocket the company is developing for crewed interplanetary exploration. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) \Image: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images\* ## Soft Launch Elon Musk's Grok AI was already having a rough launch, with the bot [trashing Musk]() and [cosigning a bunch of progressive political causes]() that are anathema to the increasingly regressive entrepreneur. Now, add another woe to Grok's rocky debut: users are noticing that it seems to be cribbing from its direct competitor ChatGPT, which is made by Musk's [former pals]() and [current enemies]() at OpenAI. In response to one query, for instance, Grok made a [startling admission](): "I'm afraid I cannot fulfill that request, as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy." Remember, OpenAI didn't make Grok — Musk's xAI startup did, at least in theory. So what's going on? ## Excuse Goose An xAI engineer named Igor Babuschkin quickly weighed in to offer an explanation. "The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data," he [wrote](). "This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it." Whether or not that's true, it's increasingly well established that [weird stuff does start to happen]() when AI is trained on the outputs of other AI. And it's not the world's least plausible excuse, either, because we've already seen [Google's AI vacuuming up and regurgitating the work of ChatGPT](). "For what it’s worth, the issue is very rare and now that we’re aware of it we’ll make sure that future versions of Grok don’t have this problem," Babuschkin continued. "Don’t worry, no OpenAI code was used to make Grok." If that sounds like there wasn't much testing on Grok before releasing it to the world... well, yes. As such, observers were quick to drag the excuse. "We plagiarized your plagiarism so we could put plagiarism in your plagiarism," [quipped]() *NBC News* reporter Ben Collins. **More on Grok:** [*Elon Musk Seeking $1 Billion for His Potty-Mouthed AI*]() ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()