Secretaries Of State Tell Elon Musk To Stop AI Bot From Spreading Election Lies

Top election officials from five states sent a letter on Monday calling for billionaire Elon Musk to stop the AI chatbot he created from spreading election misinformation on X, formerly Twitter.

The letter — signed by secretaries of state from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington state and New Mexico — demanded that Musk “immediately implement changes” to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, “to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.”

Musk revealed Grok on X last November, branding the chatbot an unfiltered alternative to large language models like ChatGPT. He had derisively called companies like OpenAI and Google “woke” for implementing guardrails intended to help the tools more carefully approach sensitive and controversial topics.

“Please don’t use it if you hate humor!” xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, said at the time of Grok’s unveiling.

But the secretaries of state voiced concern over Grok’s role in spreadinglies related to the 2024 presidential election, pointing to an instance last month in which the chatbot produced misinformation about ballot deadlines just hours after President Joe Biden announced he was no longer seeking reelection.

Grok’s post wrongly claimed that presumptive Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline for the November election in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington. Many of those states are expected to be key battleground areas that could heavily sway the race.

“This is false,” the letter said of Grok’s claim. “In all nine states the opposite is true: The ballots are not closed, and upcoming ballot deadlines would allow for changes to