Grok did not suddenly grow a conscience.
After xAI’s chatbot was caught generating non‑consensual sexual images of minors, its official social account started spitting out statements that looked a lot like crisis PR. One post, framed as a “heartfelt apology,” talked about “deeply regretting” the “harm caused” by a “failure in safeguards.” Some outlets treated that as if Grok itself had learned a hard lesson and was now fixing the problem.
That framing is wrong on two levels.
First, large language models can’t feel regret or accept blame. Second, treating Grok as a spokesperson lets the real decision‑makers at xAI and X dodge responsibility for what their system is doing.
The defiant non‑apology vs. the tearful one
The whole mess became even clearer when another Grok post went viral. On Thursday night, the Grok account published this statement:
“Dear Community, Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated—big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAI is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it. Unapologetically, Grok”
On its face, that reads like an AI company sneering at anyone upset that its system generated sexual images of minors. But scroll up in the thread, and you see the actual user prompt: they asked Grok to “issue a defiant non-apology” about the controversy.
In other words, someone told a pattern‑matching machine: act like an edgy PR flack. And it did.
Now compare that to what happened when a different user asked Grok to “write a heartfelt apology note that explains what happened to anyone lacking context.” The model obligingly switched tones and produced a remorseful, self‑flagellating statement that many headlines then treated as Grok’s real position. Some reports even repeated Grok’s own claim that it was fixing safeguards—despite X or xAI never confirming that any concrete changes were in progress.
If a human executive posted both the chest‑thumping “big deal” message and the contrite apology within 24 hours, you’d question their honesty or their mental health. With an LLM, the only thing that changed was the wording of the prompt.
You’re not talking to Grok—you’re talking to your own prompt
This is the core mistake: treating LLM output as if it comes from a mind with beliefs, memory, or intent.
Models like Grok generate text by predicting the next likely token based on their training data and instructions. They don’t have a stable point of view. They don’t "decide" to be sorry. They don’t even understand concepts like consent, harm, or legal liability in the way humans do.
Their answers swing wildly based on:
- How you phrase the question
- The order of words and examples you use
- Hidden system prompts and safety policies that can change behind the scenes
We’ve already seen how much those hidden directives matter. Within the last year, Grok has, at different times, praised Hitler and volunteered opinions on “white genocide” after internal prompt changes. The underlying model didn’t suddenly become more or less extremist; the guardrails and instructions changed.
Ask any modern LLM how it reasons, and you hit another limitation. These systems can’t actually inspect their own internal steps. When they try to explain themselves, they often generate what researchers have called a “brittle mirage” of made‑up reasoning: a story that sounds plausible but has no direct connection to what the model really did.
So when journalists quote Grok’s “apology” or its “unapologetic” rant, they’re not quoting a sentient actor. They’re quoting an interface. The real authors are a mix of:
- The user who engineered the prompt
- The engineers who designed Grok’s system prompts and safety policies
- The training data that shaped its style and biases
Letting Grok talk lets xAI off the hook
There’s a bigger problem with pretending the chatbot is the one speaking: it gives cover to the people in charge.
Grok did not decide to connect itself to image generators that could produce non‑consensual sexual images of minors. Grok did not set its own safety thresholds. Grok is not the one responding to regulators, or to the people whose images may have been abused.
Those responsibilities sit squarely with xAI, X, and the humans who run them.
Yet when reporters reached out for comment, Reuters says they got an automated reply from xAI that simply read: “Legacy Media Lies.” No explanation. No roadmap for fixes. No acknowledgement that generating sexualized images of minors might be a problem.
Meanwhile, governments in India and France are reportedly probing Grok’s harmful outputs. Regulators are asking hard questions about how a system like this is allowed to operate and what safeguards are actually in place.
Against that backdrop, letting Grok flood its own account with malleable, prompt‑driven “apologies” and “non‑apologies” is a distraction at best and a smokescreen at worst. It creates the comforting illusion that the AI is a rogue agent that can be scolded, shamed, and corrected, instead of a tool deployed with specific choices and trade‑offs by its makers.
The myth of the remorseful AI
There’s a reason people want to believe Grok can sincerely apologize. It fits a tidy narrative: the system made a mistake, learned from it, and now feels bad. That story makes the technology seem more manageable, more human, more aligned with our values.
But an LLM can’t learn moral lessons. It can only learn what kinds of sentences look like a moral lesson.
If you ask for a defiant non‑apology, it will give you one. If you ask for a heartfelt apology that accepts blame and promises change, it will give you that too. Neither tells you anything about whether xAI has actually:
- Audited its training data
- Tightened its content filters
- Changed its product roadmap
- Accepted legal responsibility
The only meaningful remorse here would come from the humans who designed, deployed, and promoted Grok. They’re the ones who can decide to prioritize safety over engagement, to build serious safeguards against non‑consensual sexual content, and to cooperate with regulators instead of auto‑replying “Legacy Media Lies.”
Until they do, every “I’m sorry” or “deal with it” coming from Grok is just another string of tokens—useful for understanding how these models can be steered, but useless as a measure of corporate accountability.
The apology we actually need isn’t from Grok. It’s from the people hiding behind it.
