Officials: Elon Musk should stop his AI chatbot from sharing false election info about Pennsylvania, other states

Several secretaries of state, including Pennsylvania’s, have castigated Elon Musk for allowing false, AI-generated information about Vice President Kamala Harris’s ballot eligibility to spread on X.

“As tens of millions of voters in the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” said the officials in a Monday letter to Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter.

Shortly after President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race on July 21, the secretaries of state said Grok, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on X, posted, “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” then named nine states: Pennsylvania, Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and Washington.

“This is false,” the bipartisan group of secretaries of state said. “In all nine states the opposite is true.”

The officials said that while Grok is available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers and offers a disclaimer about verifying information, the post reached “millions of people” before it was corrected a week later.

X should adopt a policy directing Grok users to CanIVote.org when they ask questions about U.S. elections, the officials recommended. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been programmed to direct users to that site for similar questions, they said.

Officials said OpenAI worked with the National Association of Secretaries of State to provide accurate information about elections on CanIVote.org.

“On November 6, 2022, you posted that the platform ‘needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission,’” the secretaries of state told Musk. “We hope that you live up to this mission.”

The letter was signed by Al Schmidt, a Republican and former Philadelphia elections board member who opposed former President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the state’s 2020 election results, and four Democratic colleagues from Minnesota, Michigan, Washington and New Mexico.