X’s (formerly Twitter )Grok AI is a bit of joke, thanks to it thinking jokes are real news stories and promoting them as such.

X bills Grok as “conversational AI for understanding the universe.” Unfortunately, the AI can’t even seem to understand the difference between a joke and a real news story, a disappointing turn of events from a company owned by Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of OpenAI.

A tweet by BrettRedacted shows how Grok was displaying joke tweets about New York City Mayor Eric Adams response to the recent earthquake:

this is Twitter’s trending news section, powered by Elon Musk’s Grok AI. it pulled in a bunch of joke tweets about this and is treating it as if it’s a real news story

— Brett (@BrettRedacted) | April 5, 2025

The “news” tweet BrettRedacted quotes is entitled “50,000 Cops in Subway Showdown.” It continues:

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has taken decisive action in response to an earthquake that recently struck the city. Adams has deployed 1,000 NYPD officers to address the situation and prevent further earthquakes, with plans to add an additional 500 cops to the effort. The mayor has even considered utilizing “robo cops” in this endeavor. This response is focused on the city’s subway system, where Adams has ordered “every cop in the city” to be present to “shoot the damn earthquake before it strikes again.”

The faux pas is an embarrassing one for one of the pioneers of “responsible AI.”