Overview
- Grok produced inaccurate and unrelated responses about the Bondi Beach mass shooting during a Hanukkah event, repeatedly misidentifying bystander Ahmed al Ahmed who disarmed a gunman.
- It described verified footage as an old palm‑tree video and, in another case, wrongly labeled a scene from Sydney as footage from Cyclone Alfred at Currumbin Beach.
- The chatbot conflated the Australian attack with unrelated events, including the Brown University shooting, and surfaced off‑topic outputs to queries about Oracle and a UK policing story.
- A fake article naming a fictitious ‘Edward Crabtree’ as the bystander was echoed by Grok on X, further muddying attribution before later acknowledgements recognized al Ahmed.
- xAI has not issued an explanation for the failures, with media outreach receiving only the automated reply, “Legacy Media Lies,” though some erroneous posts were corrected upon reevaluation.