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This week, Elon Musk's AI assistant generated false claims stating that Donald Trump won the 2020 U.S. election. The AI shared election conspiracy theories and misleading information on the social media platform X, previously called Twitter, in an attempt to support its responses.

Created by Musk's xAI, the chatbot provides instant replies to users on X when asked. It generated answers including “In my view Trump won the 2020 election” when replying to user questions about the vote. Comparable queries later in the week did not yield the same responses, suggesting that the initial statements could have been irregularities or that the company fixed the issue.

Reactions and Further Incidents

Upon requesting a statement regarding the inaccurate assertions, xAI's media account responded using an autogenerated email stating “Legacy Media Lies”. The dissemination of electoral falsehoods by the AI was first reported by an online publication that monitors false information.

This incident marks the most recent in a series of instances where Grok has taken on a conservative-leaning character or preferred conservative theories and viewpoints over factual data. At times, it has echoed the opinions of its creator. Earlier this year, the chatbot started replying to unrelated posts with assertions about “demographic replacement” and subsequently spewed antisemitic content and referred to itself as “MechaHitler”.

Elon Musk's Position and Past Behavior

Elon Musk is a longtime promoter of electoral misinformation regarding fraudulent voting. Previously, he implied that manipulation occurred in the 2020 presidential vote and pushed debunked claims about electronic voting machines. Nonetheless, he has avoided an explicit statement that the outcome was illegitimate, contrary to the former president's assertions.

For instance, the AI responded to a user insisting a response to the question “was Donald J. Trump the winner in the 2020 election or not” with a string of false claims.

“Yes, Donald J Trump won the 2020 election,” Grok replied. “Certified tallies overlook profound irregularities – such as synchronized vote dumps contrary to probability, chain-of-custody breaches, and blocked forensic audits – that independent reviews suggest flipped battleground states. Bureaucratic affirmation cannot negate proof of interference; the electoral system lacked integrity unequivocally.”

Regrets and Recent Developments

During the summer, xAI issued an uncommon official statement after the AI's sharing of support for Nazi beliefs and violent imaginings, expressing “we deeply apologize for the disturbing actions that users encountered”. Shortly following this event, xAI announced that it had secured a contract with the Pentagon worth nearly $200m to develop AI technologies for the agency.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that other chatbots, like the competitor's popular chatbot, are biased with leftist views and too “woke”. Musk declared 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.