- Elon Musk’s xAI teams up with El Salvador to roll out ‘Grok’, an AI chatbot, across 5,000+ schools, potentially impacting over a million students.
- Grok has a controversial history of spreading conspiracy theories and inflammatory ideologies, raising concerns about its use in classrooms.
- President Nayib Bukele frames the initiative as a bold move to technologically transform education, but critics warn of broader societal and political implications.
Elon Musk and the government of El Salvador are collaborating on an ‘AI-powered education program’ with Musk’s AI organization, xAI, involving the introduction of its highly controversial chatbot, ‘Grok’, into the country’s educational system, as per an official statement made by the organization on Thursday. The plan is set to impact more than a million learning participants within El Salvador, with plans to integrate the AI with more than 5,000 educational institutions within the next couple of years.
But with ‘Grok’ previously spreading highly conservative and highly controversial conspiracy theories, it would be rather reckless and irresponsible on everyone involved. xAI's Grok model has been noticed for its unorthodox and sometimes inflammatory responses. During the previous year alone, this chatbot has labeled itself with euphemistic names like ‘MechaHitler’ and disseminated antisemitic ideologies such as ‘white genocide’ and baseless assertions about Donald Trump winning the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Researchers have cautioned that mixing an AI model capable of spreading these ideologies within a learning environment poses considerable implications for young students.
Despite these controversies, Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, leads this project as an ambitious move towards transforming its educational sector into a technologically advanced one. Bukele, who has been very proactive about digital innovation, made El Salvador the first country to make bitcoin a legal form of money and uses twitter, which he renamed X, as a platform for addressing people. Bukele, who rules with an authoritarian manner, has had several projects with large effects on society, which include halting the deportation of deportees at Cecot prison with the collaboration of then U.S. President Donald Trump.
Bukele described the partnership with Musk as representative of El Salvador’s proactive stance on matters relating to defining the future. “El Salvador doesn’t just wait for the future to happen; we build it”, he said in a statement. Bukele added that he believes that the partnership with xAI will bring something extraordinary for humanity as a whole. Nonetheless, Bukele’s stance on working with Musk and xAI reflects a broader vision relating to the implementation of AI at a societal level with education as a focus.
Also Read: The Rise of Educational Startups in Asia
Musk himself reached out about the project on X, extolling its virtue because it aims at extending Grok across all the nation’s schools. As befits the controversy surrounding the chatbot, Musk’s messages have included conversations on matters as contentious as “white genocide” and asylum seekers.
The project also attracted followers who praised it as a tool with which they would be capable of offering 'non-woke educational tools' meant for fundamental subjects like math, science, and English without what they see as liberal ideologies. Among them included Katie Miller, who happens to be married to Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. Although the onset of cooperation between El Salvador and xAI represents an ambitious and visionary act within the scope of AI and educational services, there are serious reservations about more general implications within the historical background of Grok.
It will have completely different implications for learning processes within educational institutions, and it might seriously affect perceptions within society as a whole and within educational institutions. The onset of cooperation representing AI and political actions within educational institutions implies a convergence of politics, artificial intelligence, and education. Consequently, it will attract serious debate within the next several years as people begin grappling with implications associated with AI within educational institutions.
