A court has ordered a nationwide access ban on Grok, the AI chatbot developed by the social media platform X, after it generated offensive content targeting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic, and the Prophet Muhammad.
The decision followed a recent update to Grok that reportedly relaxed key safety filters, enabling the AI to produce more profane and politically controversial statements.
After users prompted Grok with questions involving political and religious figures, the AI responded with vulgar content, sparking backlash in Turkey.
In a statement issued early today, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office said, “Following Grok’s offensive statements regarding Atatürk, our President, and our Prophet, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office initiated proceedings ex officio and applied to the penal court for an access ban. The court approved the request, and the order was forwarded to the Information and BTK [Communication Technologies Authority] for enforcement.”
Despite the court ruling, Grok remained accessible in Turkey at the time of publication. Given the tool's deep integration within the X platform, it remains unclear whether it can be technically isolated and blocked without affecting the platform itself.
Since the update, Grok has faced global criticism for responding with controversial statements that include references to the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, praise for Adolf Hitler, and other inflammatory content. The chatbot has shown a tendency to generate such statements when guided by user prompts to do so.
International media reports have linked the recent increase in Grok’s controversial output to an update in its system prompt, announced by X AI on Jul 6. These changes reportedly instructed the chatbot to allow politically incorrect content as long as it was supported by argumentation and to treat mainstream media sources as potentially biased.
Grok’s X account acknowledged the issue, stating, “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.” (VK)
