SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk speaks during a town hall for Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump at the The Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds on October 18, 2024 in Oaks, Pennsylvania.
Elon Musk’s social media app X is supercharging the spread of voter-fraud conspiracy theories with the help of artificial intelligence, boosting unfounded claims including two personal smears against Vice President Kamala Harris.
The dubious content is spreading in the app’s “explore” section, which says it uses Musk’s AI software, named Grok, to aggregate trending social media topics. The information does not appear to be fact-checked by humans, and in several recent examples it seemed to repeat false or unsubstantiated claims as if they were true.
The feature is named “stories for you” and has a label saying it’s in a beta test, meaning it’s an experiment not available to all users. Each “story for you” consists of a feed of posts related to a trending topic. On the desktop version of X, users can also see a paragraph-long summary of the topic written by the Grok software if they look at the history of the “story for you.”
The feature’s placement in X’s explore section gives it prominent digital real estate in the final weeks of the presidential election, in which Musk is backing former President Donald Trump. Its repeated amplification of misinformation and conspiracy theories related to the election follows a string of instances where Musk has personally shared similar ideas, both in live appearances and on his social media.
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In the past week, NBC News identified five “stories for you” that pushed baseless claims related to the election.
Each trending topic curated by Grok includes a warning disclaiming any responsibility for accuracy and telling users to check facts on their own: “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs,” the disclaimer says.
On Monday, Grok uncritically repeated debunked allegations of wrongdoing related to the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Grok produced a “story for you” titled “Public Scrutiny of Dominion Voting Systems,” which aggregated posts accusing the company of “election rigging” and “fraud.” Dominion has previously denounced similar accusations as lies, and last year Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion.
Grok’s written summary of the online debate accused Dominion of “potentially stifling legitimate discussions on election security” through “legal threats.”
On Wednesday, Grok parroted unfounded claims of wrongdoing in Maricopa County, Arizona, boosting a claim by an X user that county election workers are “corrupt” because of the speed at which they count ballots.
And in a third election-related “story for you,” Grok this week spread the unsupported claim that a voting machine in Tarrant County, Texas, was “flipping” votes. X’s AI software promoted posts alleging that there were multiple examples, but only one voter came forward and his claim was not verified. Local officials said there was no evidence behind his claim, suggesting that he may have unintentionally pressed the wrong candidate. They say he was able to successfully cast the vote he intended to after he reviewed his ballot.
Grok has also spread smears against Harris, the Democratic nominee for president. It created a “story for you” repeating unfounded allegations by X users that she used cocaine in the White House, and it created a “story for you” repeating allegations by X users that she attended parties hosted by Sean “Diddy” Combs, who’s facing federal sex-abuse charges. Fact-checkers have said a photo of Combs with fashion designer Misa Hylton was altered to add Harris’ face.
Some of the posts aggregated by Grok have millions of views, though it’s not clear if the bulk of the views came before or after Grok included the posts in the trending feature.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has shared some of the same conspiracy theories amplified by his Grok software, including the unfounded allegations of wrongdoing related to Dominion Voting Systems.
The world’s richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk has poured nearly $75 million into a super PAC in support of Trump, and he has crisscrossed battleground state Pennsylvania in a drive to register pro-Trump voters and turn them out to the polls, using a $1 million daily giveaway to get people’s attention.
NBC News sought comment from X about its “stories for you” feature. Representatives for X did not respond to a list of emailed questions.
A spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems had no immediate comment on X’s “stories for you” feature but pointed to a company website that defends the accuracy of the company’s systems.
Representatives for the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The feature has been problematic in the past. In July, Grok-written summaries boosted false information about President Joe Biden, helping to spread wild conspiracy theories that Biden had an undisclosed medical emergency, might be dying, had been murdered or would be murdered soon.
It’s a job that used to be done by human curators as recently as two years ago, before Musk bought the app then known as Twitter. In 2015, Twitter’s management rolled out curated trending topics as a way to help users make sense of the flood of information on the app. Twitter employees added verified context from traditional news sources such as The Associated Press and Reuters, in an attempt to elevate the quality of information that was trending.
But Musk, in one of his first acts after buying Twitter, eliminated the jobs of human curators, and now the tech billionaire has delegated the task to his AI software.
Musk is a frequent critic of the traditional news media, including The Associated Press and Reuters, and he has promoted X as the internet’s most trustworthy news source despite the factual errors, conspiracy theories and debunked claims that appear there.
X launched the experiment in AI-written summaries months ago, and although it has received little attention, some users quickly expressed alarm about the Grok-authored text they were seeing in the beta test of the app’s “explore” section. One Reddit user in April compared the trending topic summaries to rolling “brainless AI dice.” And in July, an X user posted a screenshot of “explore beta” with text asserting that Biden would be the next coach of England’s national soccer team.
In recent weeks, dozens of X users have posted about “explore beta,” and the vast majority of the posts have been negative. One user said it was pointless, and another said it was “absolute trash.” But several said they knew of no way to opt out of the beta test.
It’s not clear how many people see the AI-created summaries. Some X users who browse the app’s trending topics see only ranked lists of popular subjects, with no AI-generated text. It’s also not clear if X plans to expand the Grok summaries from a beta test to a standard feature.
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:
