Five Secretaries of State want Elon Musk’s Grok to cool it with the election misinformation.Officials from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington, and New Mexico wrote to Musk this week urging him to change how Grok handles election inquiries.Late last month, Grok told users that ballot deadlines for nine states had passed, meaning VP Kamala Harris could not replace President Joe Biden on those ballots. “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,” the Secretaries wrote.”Furthermore, Grok continued to repeat false information for more than a week until it was corrected by July 31, 2024,” the letter says.Grok appears to have pulled the information from a tweet posted by conservative pundit Evan Kilgore, whose tweet is still up and does not appear to have a Community Note.Grok is only available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers and includes a disclaimer that it may spread false information. However, the Secretaries argue that its reach expands beyond paid users to “millions of people” since Grok’s responses can be captured and shared on social media.The officials are asking Musk to program Grok to redirect election-related inquiries to CanIVote.org to protect against chatbot hallucinations, as ChatGPT now does. Google has also restricted its Gemini chatbot from answering election-related questions.”On November 6, 2022, you posted that [Twitter] ‘needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission.’ We hope that you live up to this mission,” the Secretaries of State wrote to Musk.
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Grok has been caught peddling false political headlines on numerous occasions. It claimed Indian Prime Minister Modi lost the election, which he won. After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, it also said VP Harris was shot, The Wall Street Journal reports.Musk has made criticizing the press a mainstay of his social media presence. In 2022, he argued that “all news sources are partially propaganda, some more than others,” and insisted that “Twitter gives you immediate news from the actual sources themselves vs filtered, hidden-agenda ‘news’ that is days old.” Musk started xAI to go up against ChatGPT, which he criticized as a propaganda machine, though he has had a long-running dispute with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.Musk hasn’t tweeted about the Secretaries’ letter; Grok is scheduled for an update this month.
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