Elon Musk’s Grok is at it again. This time, the AI chatbot has been caught erroneously telling voters that the US presidential ballot is finalized in eight states.As The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports, people are sharing screenshots of Grok telling them that the presidential ballots are “locked and loaded” in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. This comes days after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But nothing is finalized yet. Democratic delegates don’t start voting until Aug. 1 while the Democratic National Convention isn’t until Aug. 19. “States have not yet printed ballots for the general election,” the National Task Force on Election Crises said earlier this week.When asked about this, however, Grok points to a tweet from conservative pundit Evan Kilgore, who said earlier this week that “the ballot deadline has already passed” in the eight states above. Kilgore’s tweet is still up and does not appear to have a Community Note.Engadget notes that if you swap Grok to “fun mode,” it still lists the incorrect information but tells users “But hey, at least they’ve got their ballots ready to go, right?” Repeated attempts to ask the bot the same question get the same wrong answer each time. The error caught the attention of Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who said in a statement that “misinformation has been circulating on social media sites stating that the presidential ballots in Minnesota and several other states have been finalized. This is not accurate.” In Minnesota, “major political parties have until August 26, 2024 to report the names of their presidential and vice-presidential candidates for the November 5 General Election.”The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), where Simon serves as president, reached out to X about the problem. The company simply noted that Grok is scheduled for an update to Grok 2 in August and that a disclaimer warns people that information it spits out should be fact-checked, the Star Tribune reports.AI companies have been moving to prevent their chatbots from spewing false information around elections. Google restricts Gemini from answering election-related questions, and in January, ChatGPT maker OpenAI said it was “evolving our approach” to ensure its tools do not undermine the democratic process in any election this year.
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Simon tells the Star Tribune that NASS worked with OpenAI to direct people asking ChatGPT election-related questions to NASS’ data on registering to vote, absentee ballots, and more.Grok, meanwhile, has a history of spreading misinformation during election seasons in other countries. Notably, the bot proclaimed that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost in the Indian general election before the election took place.Grok is trained on people’s public tweets, and X quietly opted everyone into that training recently. If you’d prefer your tweets not be included, here’s how to opt out.
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