The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.

You’ll notice that xAI, which is owned by Elon Musk, strongly suggests there was an internal actor who made this “unauthorized modification” but doesn’t use the language you’d expect if it was an employee at the company. And we’re guessing that might have something to do with the fact that it wasn’t an employee necessarily, but the owner.

Some X users on Wednesday asked Grok – the AI chatbot available through Elon Musk’s social media platform – questions about simple topics like baseball players or videos of fish being flushed down toilets.