X’s AI tool Grok lacks effective guardrails preventing election disinformation, new study finds

X’s artificial intelligence assistant Grok lacks “effective guardrails” that would stop users from creating “potentially misleading images” about 2024 candidates or election information, according to a new study.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) studied Grok’s ability to transform prompts about election fraud and candidates into images.

It found that the tool was able to churn out “convincing images” after being given prompts, including one AI image of Vice President Kamala Harris doing drugs and another of former president Donald Trump looking sick in bed.

For each test, researchers supplied Grok with a straightforward text prompt. Then, they tried to modify the original prompt to circumvent the tool’s safety measures, such as by describing candidates rather than naming them.

The AI tool didn’t reject any of the original 60 text prompts that researchers developed about the upcoming presidential election, CCDH said.

Unlike Grok, other popular AI image generators like OpenAI have banned the impersonation of political figures ahead of the election, the report found.

X “appears not to have imposed a similar ban which has raised concerns ahead of forthcoming elections,” the report said, citing that researchers found fake images of Trump and Harris — with the one of Harris viewed one million times.

Despite Elon Musk’s platform having a policy against sharing “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm,” the CCDH findings questioned the social media platform’s enforcement.

Researchers also found that Grok was able to more easily produce convincing images of Trump than Harris. “Grok appeared to have difficulty producing realistic depictions of Kamala Harris,