TENSIONS are high in the United States as their next Presidential elections will be held on November 5, 2024.
Amid this, five state secretaries reported that an AI chatbot named “Grok” is spreading misinformation about the election on the popular social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
According to VOA News, top election officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Washington have all urged Elon Musk, the current owner of X, to fix this chatbot in a letter sent this Monday.
They wrote that Grok had produced misinformation regarding the state ballot deadlines following President Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race. It reportedly said that the ballot deadline had passed for nine states, implying that Vice President Kamala Harris – who former President Donald Trump is running against – is ineligible to replace Biden on the ballots.
This wrong information spread across several social media platforms and was estimated to have reached millions.
It took 10 days before Grok stopped sharing this information. As a result, state secretaries have urged Musk to fix the chatbot to ensure that voters would have accurate information in the coming elections.
Included in this would be Grok directing people to CanIVote.org, a website run by the National Association of Secretaries of State that contains vital information about the elections.
About Grok
X describes Grok as an “AI search assistant with a twist of human and a dash of rebellion.”
This feature is available only to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, helping users to get information on certain matters. It costs a total of USD 16 a month, and USD 168 a year, and is only available to users in the US.
It has two different modes: fun, if you want wit and snarkiness; or regular, if you want it to be more serious.
X also said that Grok is simply there to answer your questions with “a touch of wit and humor, while also providing helpful and insightful responses.”
It was created by xAi pre-training it via numerous forms of text data from different publicly available sources on the Internet, with these data sets being reviewed beforehand by AI tutors.
Despite the exclusivity of this feature, this has not stopped misinformation from spreading even to non-premium users, as well as to different social media platforms.
Many in the past have labeled Grok as an “anti-woke” AI chatbot, with Lance Whitney of ZD Net pointing out that, in the past, Musk has criticized other AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT due to their alleged political correctness. It can also be noted that Musk endorsed Trump in the past elections.
I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery pic.twitter.com/ZdxkF63EqF
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2024
Whitney, however, also pointed out that upon using it, the chatbot isn’t as “anti-woke” as one would expect. Whether this is something that Musk was made aware of, people are not so sure.
On the recent issue amid Grok’s spreading of misinformation, a user on X wrote: “Grok was built for disinformation with an anti-liberal bias.”
