Rachel Leingang, The Guardian; X’s AI chatbot spread voter misinformation – and election officials fought back
"Finding the source – and working to correct it – served as a test case of how election officials and artificial intelligence companies will interact during the 2024 presidential election in the US amid fears that AI could mislead or distract voters. And it showed the role Grok, specifically, could play in the election, as a chatbot with fewer guardrails to prevent the generating of more inflammatory content.
A group of secretaries of state and the organization that represents them, the National Association of Secretaries of State, contacted Grok and X to flag the misinformation. But the company didn’t work to correct it immediately, instead giving the equivalent of a shoulder shrug, said Steve Simon, the Minnesota secretary of state. “And that struck, I think it’s fair to say all of us, as really the wrong response,” he said.
Thankfully, this wrong answer was relatively low-stakes: it would not have prevented people from casting a ballot. But the secretaries took a strong position quickly because of what could come next.
“In our minds, we thought, well, what if the next time Grok makes a mistake, it is higher stakes?” Simon said. “What if the next time the answer it gets wrong is, can I vote, where do I vote … what are the hours, or can I vote absentee? So this was alarming to us.”
Especially troubling was the fact that the social media platform itself was spreading false information, rather than users spreading misinformation using the platform.
The secretaries took their effort public. Five of the nine secretaries in the group signed on to a public letter to the platform and its owner, Elon Musk. The letter called on X to have its chatbot take a similar position as other chatbot tools, like ChatGPT, and direct users who ask Grok election-related questions to a trusted nonpartisan voting information site, CanIVote.org.
The effort worked. Grok now directs users to a different website, vote.gov, when asked about elections."
