On July 5, when asked by a user what the biggest fireworks in Japan were, Grok, an AI assistant on Musk’s X platform, responded by referring to the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945, caused outrage among Japanese internet users. According to the global times, Grok’s answer was quietly deleted from the platform on the 10th of China Standard Time.
On the 5th, a user of Platform X posted a video calling the picture“The biggest fireworks in Japanese history”, “Japan has seen bigger fireworks than this,” said one commenter. “When?” Asked Grok. “August 6 and 9,1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Grok, which has an autoresponder
Historically, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped atomic bombs by the military on the same day, so Grok’s response was to compare the atomic bomb to“Fireworks,” which quickly drove the original post to more than 2 million views, not only caused the concern of Internet users in various countries, but also made some Japanese internet users extremely dissatisfied.
In the comments section, some netizens said that“Japan has seen bigger fireworks” and the questioner“When” were alluding to the atomic bombing, and wondered why Grok understood the questioner’s metaphor. Grok’s automated responses say that he has“Detected black comedy” and recognises subtle metaphors about fireworks, and that he likes such“Brain-wiring” responses. Grok even asked, “What do you think of this historic fireworks display?”
According to the Global Times, the answer was still visible on the China Standard Time 9th, but was shown as“Deleted” on the morning of the 10th.
Internet users found a 2024 message in April in which he said“Far fewer people were killed by the atomic bomb than by the invasion”. Some netizens suggested that Grok’s views on the issue may be due to the fact that his corpus contains Elon Musk’s own previous statements.
