Users of Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, have observed that xAI is copying ChatGPT’s code to train its bot as some of its replies to queries cite OpenAI. 

A Grok user, Jax Winterbourne, who first shared the observation on X posted Grok’s response to a prompt citing Open AI. According to him, the response showed that Grok was ‘just ripping OpenAI’s code base.’ 

Although Grok is currently only available to X Premium Plus subscribers, some of the users are noticing that Grok seems to be picking its content from ChatGPT.

Another user identified as Pezzo, also shared a response from Grok asking him to report an issue by contacting the support team via ‘support@openai.com’.  

xAI engineer admits to copying 

In response to the posts, an xAI engineer, Igor Babuschkin, admitted that data from ChatGPT were ‘accidentally’ picked when training Grok. 

• “The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data. This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it. For what it’s worth, the issue is very rare and now that we’re aware of it we’ll make sure that future versions of Grok don’t have this problem. Don’t worry, no OpenAI code was used to make Grok,” he said.  

The AI war 

Announcing the launch of Grok in November, Elon Musk described the AI model as “the best that currently exists in some important respects. 

According to Musk, Grok will leverage “real-time access” to information on X, and, like ChatGPT, the model has internet browsing capabilities, enabling it to search the web for up-to-date information about specific topics.

The model answers questions conversationally, possibly drawing on a knowledge base similar to that used to train ChatGPT and other comparable text-generating models.

Unlike other models, the billionaire added that xAI’s Grok system is designed to have a little humour in its responses. 

Meanwhile, Musk had previously called out AI firms like OpenAI for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models. According to Musk, hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” affecting user experience. 

AI data or content scraping, also known as web harvesting, is when one computer program extracts valuable information already generated by another program or website.

Due to the generative AI boom, massive numbers of automated scraper bots have been gathering data/knowledge to feed to their chatbots