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Elon Musk's X platform has made a change to its AI assistant Grok that could prevent it from giving users false information about voting deadlines and other election-related matters. According to X, Grok will now direct users to Vote.gov for election-related questions.
X, formerly Twitter, made the change about two weeks after five secretaries of state complained to the company. “On August 21, 2024, X's Director of U.S. and Canadian Global Government Affairs informed the Minnesota Secretary of State's Office [Steve Simon] that the platform has made changes to its AI search assistant Grok following a request from several foreign ministers,” Simon's office said in a press release yesterday.
Grok is developed by xAI, one of Musk's other companies, and is available to paying subscribers on X.
Simon and the secretaries of state of Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington sent Musk a letter about Grok on August 5. The letter noted that “within hours of President Joe Biden withdrawing his presidential candidacy on July 21, 2024, false information about election deadlines produced by Grok was circulating on multiple social media platforms.”
The fake Grok post said the “deadline for the 2024 election has passed in several states,” and listed nine states where the deadline had supposedly passed. “This is false. In all nine states, the opposite is true: ballots are not closed, and upcoming deadlines would allow for changes to the candidates listed on the ballot for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States,” the Aug. 5 letter said.
X took the time to correct incorrect posts
Grok, which is also known for creating hoaxes based on X users' jokes, continued to falsely announce the July 31 voting deadline. Grok “provided inaccurate information about the voting rules … and then delayed correcting its own error for 10 days, even after learning that the information it had disseminated was false,” Simon's office said.
Although this misinformation was eventually corrected, the Secretary of State urged Musk to “immediately implement a policy directing Grok users to CanIVote.org for questions about U.S. elections.”
CanIVote.org redirects to a site managed by the National Association of Secretaries of State. X instead redirects users to Vote.gov, which is managed by the U.S. government.
The secretaries of state said they were pleased with the change because Vote.gov and CanIvote.org are both trusted resources. “We appreciate X's actions to improve their platform and hope they continue to make improvements that ensure their users have access to accurate information from trusted sources during this crucial election year,” the state officials said in a joint statement.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is already programmed to direct users to CanIVote.org, they said in their latest letter. “As you know, inaccuracies are to be expected in all AI products, especially chatbots built on large language models… As tens of millions of voters across the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this important election year, X has a responsibility to ensure that all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” the state officials wrote to Musk.