“We are calling for immediate implementation of changes to the xAI search assistant Grok to ensure voters receive accurate information in this critical year electoral” – they appeal to Elon Musk the secretaries of five American states: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan and New Mexico.
Elon Musk's chatbot spreads lies about the US presidential election
Grok is an AI chatbot developed by xAI, an initiative by Elon Musk and a response to the meteoric rise of ChatuGPT. It is available only with the X Premium subscription. However, the false information provided by this chatbot was also allegedly repeated on other social media. Several election falsehoods were listed in a letter to Musk.
Grok was supposed to convince his interlocutors, among other things, that changing the Democratic candidate from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris is not possible in nine states because the deadline for voting on candidates has passed. Meanwhile, it is still possible to change the candidate in each of the states, and the votes have not yet been held. Before the information was corrected, the chatbot repeated the lies for nine days.
“In an election year, it is critical that voters have accurate information about how to exercise their right to vote,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “Voters should contact their state or local election officials to learn how, when and where they can vote,” added one of the signatories to Musk’s letter.
United States. Elon Musk turned out to be a hypocrite?
The situation with Elon Musk's chatbot is all the more surprising because just a few days ago, the billionaire complained that Google favored one of the candidates for president of the United States. He provided posts informing that the search engine deliberately omits Donald Trump.
In a screenshot shared by Musk, Google suggestions for the terms “assassination attempt” and “president Donald” don't show Trump in autocomplete suggestions. Furthermore, in another screenshot, when users typed “President Donald,” Google's autocomplete suggestions looked like “President Donald Duck” and “President Donald Reagan.”
Another screenshot (Elon Musk has posted quite a few) showed Google generating a search for “Harris news” in response to a query about Donald Trump. Google explained that many of the articles were about both of them, hence the confusion in the search. The billionaire asked in one of his posts whether this was “election interference.”