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Five secretaries of state on Monday urged Elon Musk to fix the artificial intelligence-hunting assistant on his social media platform X after it allegedly shared false information about the 2024 presidential election.
The secretaries said in a letter to Musk that X’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, was used in many states shortly after President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid against former President Donald Trump on July 21. Users were misled about voting deadlines.
Musk, billionaire CEO Tesla The company backed Republican presidential candidate Trump before Biden dropped out of the race and backed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
Within hours of Biden’s withdrawal, a Grok post claimed that “voting deadlines have passed in several states for the 2024 elections,” according to a letter to Musk from the secretary of state, which oversees state elections.
The post claimed that these states include the key battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico, as well as Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Texas and Washington, according to the letter to the Minnesota Secretary of State. Letter sent on Steve Simon’s letterhead.
“In all nine states, the exact opposite is true,” the letter said. Washington post.
“Voting has not yet closed and the upcoming voting deadline will allow changes to be made to the candidates listed on the ballot for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States,” the letter said.
The letter was signed by Simon and co-signed by Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve Hobbs of Washington State, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan and Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico.
Schmidt is a Republican. The other four signatories are all Democrats.
CNBC has asked Musk to comment on the letter.
Musk has previously said he created and is working on Donate A political action committee supporting Trump and the Republican Party.
Benson’s office is investigating the group’s collection of voter data in key battleground states.
In Monday’s letter, the secretary of state wrote that Gronk’s false claims were “shared on multiple social media platforms” within hours of Biden’s announcement.
The letter states that Grok is only available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, and comes with a disclaimer asking users to verify their answers.
But officials wrote that “false information about voting deadlines has been captured and shared repeatedly across multiple posts — impacting millions of people.”
“Additionally, Grok continued to repeat this false information for more than a week and was not corrected until July 31, 2024,” the letter states.
The letter also urges X to follow the lead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been programmed to direct users to non-partisan websites CanIVote.org When asked about the US election.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Steve Hobbs is Washington Secretary of State. Previous versions provided incorrect names.
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