Elon Musk’s social media app ‘X’ accelerates the spread of voter fraud conspiracy theories with the help of artificial intelligence, and baseless claims include two personal slurs against Vice President Kamala Harris is being strengthened.
The questionable content is being spread in the app’s Explore section, which claims to use Musk’s AI software called Grok to aggregate trending topics on social media. This information does not appear to have been fact-checked by humans, and in some recent instances it appeared to repeat false or unsubstantiated claims as if they were true.
The feature is called “stories for you” and is labeled as being in beta testing. This means that it is an experiment that is not available to all users. Each Story for You consists of a feed of posts related to a trending topic. In the desktop version of X, users can also view a paragraph-by-paragraph summary of topics written by the Grok software when viewing the History of Stories for You.
The feature’s placement in the Explorer section of X gives it prominent digital real estate in the final weeks of the presidential election, when Musk endorsed former President Donald Trump. The repeated amplification of election-related misinformation and conspiracy theories follows a series of instances in which Mr. Musk personally shared similar ideas in live appearances and on social media.
Last week, NBC News identified five “For You Stories” pushing unsubstantiated claims related to the election.
Each trending topic hand-picked by Grok includes a warning disclaiming any responsibility for accuracy and asking users to verify the facts themselves. “Grok may make mistakes and you should verify its output,” the disclaimer says.
On Monday, Mr. Groch uncritically repeated debunked claims of fraud related to voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Grok created a “Story for You” titled “Public Scrutiny of Dominion Voting Systems,” a compilation of posts accusing the company of “election fraud” and “fraud.” Dominion has previously called similar accusations false, and Fox News last year agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion.
In a written summary of the online discussion, Groch accused Dominion of using “legal intimidation” to “potentially stifle legitimate debate about election security.”
On Wednesday, Grok parroted unsubstantiated claims of fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona, reinforcing an X user’s claim that the county’s election officials were “corrupt” due to the speed with which they counted votes. .
And in his third election-related “Story for You” this week, Groch spread unsubstantiated claims that voting machines in Tarrant County, Texas, were “flipping” votes. X’s AI software promoted a post that claimed to have multiple instances, but only one voter came forward and his claims were not verified. Local officials said there was no evidence to support his claims and that he may have unintentionally endorsed the wrong candidate. After checking her ballot, she said she was successful in voting as planned.
Mr. Groch also spread slander against Democratic presidential candidate Ms. Harris. It created a “story for you” that repeated unsubstantiated claims by user X that she used cocaine in the White House, and that she attended a party hosted by Sean “Diddy” Combs. We have created a “story for you” that repeats the same assertion. He faces federal sexual abuse charges. Fact-finding officials said a photo of Combs and fashion designer Misa Hilton was altered to include Harris’ face.
Some of the posts aggregated by Grok have racked up millions of views, but it’s not clear whether the majority of the views came before or after Grok included the posts in its trending feature. .
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, shares some of the same conspiracy theories amplified by Grok software, including baseless claims of fraud related to Dominion Voting Systems.
Musk, the world’s richest man, according to the Bloomberg Rich List, has poured nearly $75 million into pro-Trump super PACs and criss-crossed the battleground state of Pennsylvania to get pro-Trump voters to register and cast ballots. I ran around endlessly. , attract people’s attention with daily million dollar giveaways.
NBC News reached out to X for comment on its “stories for you” feature. Representatives of Company X did not respond to a list of emailed questions.
A Dominion Voting Systems spokesperson did not immediately comment on X’s “stories for you” feature, but pointed to the company’s website defending the accuracy of its system.
Representatives for the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
This feature has had issues in the past. In July, a summary written by Grok amplified misinformation about President Joe Biden, stating that Biden has an undisclosed medical emergency, may be dying, has been killed, or will soon be killed. This helped spread the wild conspiracy theory.
It’s a job that was done by human curators until two years ago, before Musk bought the app then known as Twitter. In 2015, Twitter executives rolled out curated trending topics as a way to help users make sense of the deluge of information on the app. Twitter employees have added verified context from traditional news sources like The Associated Press and Reuters to improve the quality of what’s trending.
But in one of Musk’s first actions after taking over Twitter, he eliminated the job of human curators, and the tech billionaire is now delegating that job to his AI software.
Musk has frequently criticized traditional news outlets such as the Associated Press and Reuters, calling X the most trusted news outlet on the internet despite factual errors, conspiracy theories and debunked claims. It has been advertised as a source.
X started experimenting with AI-written summaries a few months ago, and while it received little attention, some users were quick to comment on the Grok-generated text they saw in a beta test in the app’s Explore section. expressed concern. In April, one Reddit user likened the outline of trending topics to the rolling of “brainless AI dice.” And in July, User
In recent weeks, dozens of X users have posted about “exploring the beta,” and the majority of posts have been negative. One user said it was pointless, while another said it was “utter rubbish.” But some said they didn’t know how to opt out of the beta test.
It’s unclear how many people will see the AI-generated summaries. Some X users who browse the app’s trending topics only see a ranked list of popular themes, not AI-generated text. It’s also unclear whether X plans to expand Grok Summary from beta testing to a standard feature.
