Top election officials from five states sent a letter on Monday calling for billionaire Elon Musk to stop the AI chatbot he created from spreading election misinformation on X, formerly Twitter.
The letter — signed by secretaries of state from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington state and New Mexico — demanded that Musk “immediately implement changes” to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, “to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.”
Musk revealed Grok on X last November, branding the chatbot an unfiltered alternative to large language models like ChatGPT. He had derisively called companies like OpenAI and Google “woke” for implementing guardrails intended to help the tools more carefully approach sensitive and controversial topics.
“Please don’t use it if you hate humor!” xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, said at the time of Grok’s unveiling.
But the secretaries of state voiced concern over Grok’s role in spreading lies related to the 2024 presidential election, pointing to an instance last month in which the chatbot produced misinformation about ballot deadlines just hours after President Joe Biden announced he was no longer seeking reelection.
Grok’s post wrongly claimed that presumptive Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline for the November election in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington. Many of those states are expected to be key battleground areas that could heavily sway the race.
“This is false,” the letter said of Grok’s claim. “In all nine states the opposite is true: 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 is currently only available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, and the bot has a disclaimer asking users to verify the information it produces. However, the ballot deadline misinformation from Grok managed to be captured and shared in more publicly accessible posts that reached millions, according to the secretaries of state. The chatbot’s misinformation was only corrected 10 days later.
“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,” stated the letter, first obtained by The Washington Post.
The secretaries of state urged X to implement a policy of directing Grok users asking about U.S. elections to “CanIVote.org,” which the officials said is a nonpartisan resource from professional election administrators of both Democratic and Republican parties. OpenAI partnered with secretaries of state this year to provide more accurate election information, and ChatGPT is already programmed to direct its users to the website when asked about the elections.
A spokesperson for X did not answer HuffPost’s request for comment, sending an automatic response that said, “Busy now, please check back later.”
The company’s delayed response to Grok’s misinformation was “the equivalent of a shoulder shrug,” according to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who spearheaded the letter.
“It’s important that social media companies, especially those with global reach, correct mistakes of their own making – as in the case of the Grok AI chatbot simply getting the rules wrong,” Simon told the Post. “Speaking out now will hopefully reduce the risk that any social media company will decline or delay correction of its own mistakes between now and the November election.”