A day after X's AI chatbot Grok spewed offensive content, X chief executive Linda Yaccarino has announced she is to step down from the social media company.
Ms Yaccarino did not give a reason behind her decision.
“When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company,” she wrote on the platform.
“I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App,” she wrote. She said she would continue “cheering” for the staff who remain at X after her resignation.
On Tuesday, the Grok chatbot started to answer user prompts with offensive comments. Its remarks became so offensive that a court in Turkey temporarily blocked access to Grok.
Users had reported that Grok began to insult President Tayyip Erdogan, as well as the country's religious values.
Other users accused Grok of also giving anti-Semitic answers to prompts. It praised Adolf Hitler at one point.
The offensive posts gave more reasons for critics of Mr Musk to question his leadership of the company.
In recent years, he had posted several comments that have been considered anti-Semitic, racist and bigoted. Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election, Mr Musk gave what many considered to be a Nazi salute in front of his supporters during a rally.
The mercurial technology tycoon and entrepreneur, who bought Twitter in 2022, appointed Ms Yaccarino as chief executive in 2023.
His decision stemmed from a series of decisions on content moderation that alienated some users and prompted a mass exodus of advertisers.
At the time Ms Yaccarino was named chief executive, many analysts believed she would play good cop to Mr Musk's bad cop, and help to shore up the advertising side of X's business.
His fervent and significant financial support of Mr Trump often hindered her efforts, with X struggling with a mass exit of users and an increase for rival platforms Threads and BlueSky.
Convincing companies to continue to advertise on X proved to be an uphill battle.
X later merged with Mr Musk's artificial intelligence endeavour, xAI. There was speculation that the move was made to bolster the financial stability of both companies.
Regardless, the merger provided greater integration of xAI's Grok chatbot into the X social media platform.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” read a post from the main Grok account on X.
“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” the post continued, stopping short of elaborating on what caused the chatbot to suddenly provide offensive answers.
X later said that it was working to “quickly identify” and update the Grok language model to prevent further problems.
Mr Musk didn't directly address the issue, which lasted several hours, only cryptically posting a message about it. “Never a dull moment on this platform,” he wrote.
As for the departure of Ms Yaccarino, Mr Musk replied to her post on X that announced her resignation, expressing gratitude.
"Thank you for your contributions," he succinctly wrote.
