A group of five US state secretaries is demanding that Elon Musk take immediate action to correct the election misinformation disseminated by xAI's chatbot, Grok. The Washington Post reports that Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon leads the coalition in requesting Musk ensure that voters get accurate information during this election cycle.
False Claims About Kamala Harris
Grok has been spreading incorrect information about Vice President Kamala Harris's eligibility for the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Specifically, the chatbot falsely asserted that ballot deadlines in nine states, including Alabama, Indiana, and Michigan, had already passed.
The secretaries of state from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan, and New Mexico have addressed an open letter to Musk, urging him to correct the misinformation and direct users to CanIVote.org for factual election information.
Timeline of Inaccurate Information
These misleading statements began to circulate on July 21, following President Joe Biden's announcement to suspend his presidential campaign. Grok continued to spread the falsehoods to millions of X users until they were corrected on July 31. However, by that time, the inaccurate information had already reached a significant audience.
Grok's access is restricted to subscribers of X Premium and Premium+. Despite a disclaimer recommending users verify information, the misleading statements about ballot deadlines were still widely shared.
Musk has been criticized for his approach to political discourse on X. Reports indicate that X has a smaller team of moderators compared to other social platforms. This downsizing is attributed to Musk reducing the company's trust and safety staff by about 80%. X had previously promised to set up a new trust and safety center in Austin, Texas, but hired fewer than expected.
Grok Chatbot History
Grok 1.5, the latest iteration released in March, featured enhanced reasoning and a context length of 128,000 tokens. Although it didn't surpass GPT-4 in tests like MMLU, MATH, and GSM8K, it did outperform GPT-4 in the HumanEval benchmark. Musk has said that Grok 3 and even Grok 4 are likely to launch by the end of the year.
Grok remains less popular than rivals like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, partly due to not having a free version. Given the high operational costs of language models and Musk's aim to boost X's revenue, a free version of Grok seems unlikely in the near future. The fact Grok is a paywall AI model makes its errors and hallucinations even more annoying.
