Five US states push Elon Musk to fix AI chatbot over election misinformation

“As Secretaries of State whose offices and 37 million constituents were recently impacted by false information provided by your platform, we are calling on you to immediately implement changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year,” the officials from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan and New Mexico said in an open letter to Musk.

“This is false. In all nine states the opposite is true,” the letter from the secretaries of state added.

Musk said in March that Grok – a chatbot from artificial intelligence start-up xAI – would be enabled for all premium subscribers of X.

The officials said in their letter that even though the chatbot is only available to premium users, its misinformation was shared with millions of people on social media.

The officials said X should direct Grok users to CanIVote.org, a non-partisan website on US voting information, when asked about US elections.

The social media platform did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

X, which researchers say has scaled back content moderation efforts and reinstated once-banned accounts of known misinformation spreaders, has also faced criticism for stoking tensions during recent far-right riots across England.

Additional reporting by Associated Press, Agence France-Presse