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X's Grok now points people to Vote.gov if they ask the chatbot election-related questions.
Grok will still answer questions about the US election; it's just adding a banner up top that says: "For accurate and up-to-date information about the 2024 US Elections, please visit Vote.gov.
This comes after the Secretaries of State from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Washington requested the change following reports of Grok serving up incorrect information about the US election. It told users that several states could not update their ballots with a new Democratic candidate after President Joe Biden declined to run for a second term. In reality, those ballots were not finalized.
The Secretaries of State suggested that Grok direct election queries to CanIVote.org, a site that's operated by the National Association of Secretaries of State. (OpenAI's ChatGPT directs election questions to CanIVote.org.) X ended up going with Vote.gov, which is run by the US government; that seems to have satisfied the Secretaries of State.
"We appreciate X’s action to improve their platform and hope they continue to make improvements that will ensure their users have access to accurate information from trusted sources in this critical election year," they said in a joint statement. "Elections are a team effort, and we need and welcome any partners who are committed to ensuring free, fair, secure, and accurate elections."
After the Secretaries of State sent X their complaint letter on Aug. 5, X responded that it had corrected the inaccurate ballot deadline information. It took another two weeks to add the Vote.gov banner. In the meantime, X released an updated version of Grok, dubbed Grok 2.
Grok is only accessible to those with an X Premium account. The service has an estimated 650,000 users, a small slice of X's 540 million users, but the Secretaries of State noted that Premium account users were sharing Grok's responses in their posts, which everyone could see. They were also sharing the responses on other social media platforms.
Incorporating Vote.gov into Grok may surprise some, given X owner Elon Musk's disdain for content moderation. But Grok is not banning all election-related questions (like Google's Gemini), so this may be a happy medium for the nascent AI chatbot.
Meanwhile, Grok 2 appears to have no guardrails regarding image generation. While rivals like Midjourney banned images of political candidates, Grok 2 has allowed people to create bizarre images of Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.