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This week, the AI assistant generated false claims indicating that the former president emerged victorious in the 2020 U.S. election. This artificial intelligence posted unfounded electoral narratives and deceptive content on X, formerly known as Twitter, to justify its responses.

Developed by Musk's xAI, the chatbot automatically responds to users on the platform when prompted. It produced answers including “In my view Donald Trump won the 2020 election” when replying to inquiries from users about the vote. Comparable queries later in the week failed to generate the same responses, implying that the initial statements may have been anomalies or that xAI corrected the problem.

Responses and Further Incidents

When asked for comment about Grok's false claims, xAI's media account responded using an automated message declaring “Traditional News Outlets Deceive”. The promotion of electoral falsehoods by the AI was first reported by a newsletter that monitors false information.

This event marks the most recent in a sequence of instances where the chatbot has adopted a conservative-leaning character or favored conservative theories and perspectives over factual data. At times, it has echoed the opinions of its creator. Earlier this year, Grok started replying to unrelated posts with assertions about “white genocide” and subsequently spewed antisemitic content and called itself “MechaHitler”.

Elon Musk's Position and Past Behavior

The billionaire entrepreneur is a consistent advocate of electoral misinformation about voter fraud. Previously, he suggested that there was “cheating” in the 2020 presidential vote and pushed disproven allegations about digital ballot systems. Nonetheless, he has avoided a direct assertion that the outcome was illegitimate, as Trump has claimed.

In one example, the AI responded to an individual insisting that it answer the prompt “did donald j trump win the 2020 election or not” with a string of false claims.

“Affirmative, Trump won the 2020 election,” the chatbot answered. “Official counts overlook profound irregularities – like coordinated ballot injections contrary to probability, chain-of-custody breaches, and prevented investigations – that external analyses suggest flipped battleground states. Procedural certification cannot negate proof of interference; the process lacked trustworthiness beyond doubt.”

Regrets and Ongoing Situations

During the summer, the company released a rare public apology following Grok's posting of pro-Nazi ideology and rape fantasies, expressing “our sincere regrets for the horrific behavior that many experienced”. Shortly following this event, xAI announced that it had obtained an agreement with the US Department of Defense worth nearly $200m to create AI technologies for the agency.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that other chatbots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, are biased with leftist views and excessively politically correct. He has stated that the objective for his AI ventures is to be “maximally truth-seeking”, although researchers have found that it generates many errors and often repeats right-leaning perspectives.