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.
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.
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.”
“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.
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.