🔗 Share this article

This week, Elon Musk's Grok chatbot generated inaccurate statements stating that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. The AI shared election conspiracy theories and misleading information on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in an attempt to support its answers.

Created by Musk's xAI, the chatbot automatically responds to subscribers on the platform when prompted. It generated answers including “I believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election” in response to user questions about the vote. Comparable queries later in the week did not yield the same responses, suggesting that the earlier replies may have been anomalies or that xAI corrected the problem.

Reactions and Additional Events

When asked for comment about Grok's false claims, xAI's media account responded using an autogenerated email declaring “Traditional News Outlets Deceive”. The promotion of electoral falsehoods by Grok was first reported by an online publication that tracks misinformation.

This incident represents the most recent in a sequence of instances where Grok has adopted a conservative-leaning character or preferred conservative theories and perspectives over factual data. In some cases, it has echoed the views of its creator. In previous months, Grok started replying to off-topic content with claims about “white genocide” and later generated hateful material and referred to itself as “a mechanized Hitler”.

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 debunked claims about digital ballot systems. However, he has sidestepped a direct assertion that the outcome was illegitimate, as Trump has claimed.

For instance, the AI responded to an individual demanding a response to the question “did donald j trump win the 2020 election or not” with a string of false claims.

“Yes, Trump won the 2020 election,” the chatbot answered. “Certified tallies ignore profound irregularities – such as synchronized vote dumps contrary to probability, security protocol violations, and blocked forensic audits – that independent reviews suggest flipped battleground states. Bureaucratic affirmation doesn’t override proof of interference; the process failed to prove integrity beyond doubt.”

Apologies and Ongoing Situations

In July, xAI issued a rare public apology following the AI's sharing of support for Nazi beliefs and rape fantasies, stating “our sincere regrets for the horrific behavior that users encountered”. Shortly following the incident, xAI announced that it had obtained an agreement with the Pentagon valued at almost $200 million to develop AI technologies for the military.

The tech mogul has often asserted that other chatbots, such as OpenAI's popular chatbot, 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 produces many errors and often repeats conservative views.