AI was asked who has killed the most people in the world and people were surprised by the answer

A longer AI-generated list put the same names in a different order, with very different death tolls

An AI chatbot's ranking of the people responsible for the most deaths in history has set off a wave of surprise among users on X.

The exchange began when someone asked X's Grok who has killed the most people in the world, then asked it to name the top three.

Grok responded that estimates 'vary widely by source and method'.

It listed Mao Zedong first, with 40 to 70 million deaths linked to the Great Leap Forward famine, purges and the Cultural Revolution. Genghis Khan came second with 20 to 40 million, attributed to the Mongol conquests and related depopulation.

Joseph Stalin took third with 15 to 20 million-plus, tied to famines, Gulags and purges.

The chatbot added: "Hitler ranks close behind at 11-17 million deliberate noncombatant deaths."

The replies beneath the thread were awash with people surprised Hitler did not appear in the top three.

Hitler's admission drew the most comments. ChatGPT said Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime were responsible for the systematic murder of approximately 6 million Jewish People, alongside an estimated 11 million to 17 million-plus total victims of mass atrocities, forced labor and genocide between 1933 and 1945.

A longer top-ten list generated by AI presented things differently.

It put Mao first with 40 to 78 million deaths, Genghis Khan second with 40 million, and Hitler third, with 17 to 30 million direct victims and 50 to 80 million when total World War II deaths were counted. Stalin dropped to fourth with 20 to 40 million.

The rest of that list read: Timur (Tamerlane) with 17 million, Hong Xiuquan with 20 to 30 million for the Taiping Rebellion, King Leopold II with 10 to 15 million in the Congo Free State, Chiang Kai-shek with 10 million, Vladimir Lenin with 5 to 10 million and Hideki Tojo with 4 to 5 million.

Individual rulers are only one way of measuring the toll, and several of the worst atrocities are recorded as single events.

The Armenian Genocide, between 1915 and 1923, saw the Ottoman Empire deport, starve and massacre an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge executed, starved and worked to death an estimated 1.7 to 2 million people between 1975 and 1979, roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population.

In Rwanda in 1994, extremist Hutu militia and government forces killed an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in roughly 100 days.

During the Bosnian Genocide of 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces carried out ethnic cleansing and mass executions. That included the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed.

Topics: Artificial Intelligence, History, Social Media

Thom Bamford is a Gold Standard NCTJ senior journalist who has written a wide range of subjects including: crime, politics, music, theatre and food. I have lived in Berlin, Osaka and Cape Town and have been fortunate enough to have visited over 100 countries. My big passions are writing human interest stories and playing guitar and piano terribly.

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