Five States Call on Elon Musk to Address False Election Information From X’s Grok AI Chatbot

Elon Musk at a technology conference in Paris, France, on June 16, 2023. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)

Five secretaries of state have urged Elon Musk, the owner of X, to address the alleged spread of false information about ballot deadlines in nine states by his social media platform’s Grok AI chatbot.

In a letter to Musk on Aug. 5, Secretaries of State Washington’s Steve Hobbs,  Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson, Minnesota’s Steve Simon, New Mexico’s Maggie Toulouse Oliver, and Pennsylvania’s Al Schmidt said the AI chatbot spread false information about ballot deadlines just hours after President Joe Biden withdrew his reelection bid on July 21.

The officials allege that Grok’s results falsely claimed that “the ballot deadline has passed” for elections in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.

“In all nine states, the opposite is true,” the letter stated. “The ballots are not closed, and upcoming ballot deadlines would allow for changes to candidates listed on the ballot for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States.”

Grok repeated the false information for more than a week before it was corrected on July 31, according to the letter.

“As tens of millions of voters in the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” the letter stated.

While the letter acknowledged that Grok is only available to subscribers of X’s premium versions and the post carried a disclaimer asking users to verify its answers, they said that the misinformation had been captured and shared across multiple social media platforms, reaching millions of people.

The letter also urged the social media platform to follow the programming of ChatGPT, another AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, which directs users to the National Association of Secretaries of State’s (NASS’s) site CanIVote.org when asked about elections in the United States.

While nonpartisan, the NASS has previously accepted funding from corporate affiliates including Meta and Amazon Web Services, as well as left-of-center NGOs like Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund.

Grok was launched in November last year. The chatbot has “a rebellious streak” and was designed “to answer questions with a bit of wit,” according to X. The company said that Grok can answer “spicy questions” rejected by most other AI systems.

The Epoch Times has reached out to X for comment.

Voters Warned of ‘Pervasive’ Faked Material

Hobbs urged voters on Aug. 5 to seek out reliable information sources, such as established news outlets and official government institutions, to navigate the upcoming elections.

Hobbs said he was concerned that “a deluge of manipulated and false information may be inserted into social media from foreign actors and other sources.”

“Artificial Intelligence is getting easier and cheaper to manipulate for a broad number of malicious actors,” he said in a statement. “The rest of us must be careful to verify what we see before we take it to heart.”

Hobbs warned that faked content will likely become “pervasive” on social media. He cited Musk’s July 26 post on X that shared a manipulated recording of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.

“If the owner of a social media platform themself is going to share misleading material, it signals to the rest of us that other materials allowed there may not be trustworthy,” he stated.

Musk previously explained that the video he posted was a parody of Harris’s campaign ad.

Last year, Washington state legislators passed Senate Bill 5152, which limits the use of deepfakes in political campaigning within the state and grants candidates targeted by undisclosed deepfakes the right to sue for damages.

Musk, also the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it to X. The tech billionaire said he aims to make X “as broadly inclusive as possible, where ideally most of America is on it and talking.”