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Elon Musk's Grok AI is promoting false news stories about world events, most recently claiming that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost to his opponent, even though the election hasn't happened yet.
"PM Modi Ejected from Indian Government," the headline reads. An accompanying article claims the "shocking turn of events" represents a "significant change in India's political landscape," sparking a wide range of reactions across the nation.
The election will run from April 19 to June 1, 2024, and will be the largest democratic election in history with nearly 1 billion people eligible to vote, CNN reports.
The phony report appeared as a promoted news article in the feed of Sankrant Sanu. "This is crass and sheer election manipulation," he wrote in a post. "Does not help X's play for being a credible alternative news and information source."
X owner Musk has long feuded with the press. In 2022, he argued that "all news sources are partially propaganda, some more than others," and insisted that "Twitter gives you immediate news from the actual sources themselves vs filtered, hidden-agenda 'news' that is days old." He encourages "citizen journalism" as an alternative.
In response to Sanu's election tweet, someone responded that Grok's flub was likely not "intentional," adding "AI does weird things sometimes." Sanu countered that false information on "such a serious topic needs to be called out" and that "authorities should take note."
The incident follows a similar one earlier this month when Grok falsely reported that Iran had hit Tel Aviv "with heavy missiles." The story appeared in the trending news section on X, according to Mashable, which notes that Israel had attacked Iran's embassy in Syria earlier this week, killing four officials, so "retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence." But it was not true.
That same day, Musk advertised Grok's news capabilities to his 181 million followers. "Press the search button to see real-time customized news for you created by Grok AI," he wrote.
An updated version of Grok debuted on April 12, dubbed Grok 1.5-Vision. It's a competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4 Vision and can interpret "documents, science diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs," according to a blog post. That includes helping users decipher the meaning of GIFs and memes, PhoneArena reports, which make up the bulk of Musk's posts on his X account.