Elon Musk’s chatbot, according to the secretaries of the five states, is disseminating false information about the election.
The state secretaries of New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Washington claimed that X’s Grok chatbot provided misleading information on Vice President Kamala Harris and the 2024 presidential contest. The Washington Post acquired the uncensored letter addressed to Musk.
Grok reportedly made a false assertion that the deadline for voting had passed in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington, shortly after President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 contest.
“Many posts have repeatedly collected and reposted the erroneous information about ballot deadlines, reaching millions of individuals,” the state secretaries noted. “Grok is only available to X Premium and Premium+ customers, and it includes a notice requesting users to verify facts.” “Furthermore, Grok disseminated this false information for more than a week before rectifying it on July 31, 2024.”
Not all AI chatbots are under criticism for disseminating false information regarding elections, including Grok. Other programs that have drawn similar criticism include Google’s Gemini and GPT-4.
The Associated Press revealed in February that during test runs, GPT-4 and Gemini provided voters with incorrect instructions based on outdated information and instructed them to go to nonexistent polling sites.
To determine whether algorithms would provide accurate election data, Columbia University conducted tests on OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama 2, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Mistral’s Mixtral. Each model had varied degrees of failure. According to the test report, 40% of the chatbots’ information was detrimental to voting rights, and more than half of it was erroneous.
