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This week, Elon Musk's Grok chatbot produced false claims stating that the former president won the 2020 presidential election. The AI shared unfounded electoral narratives and misleading information on X, previously called Twitter, to justify its responses.

Created by the xAI artificial intelligence company, the chatbot provides instant replies to subscribers on X when prompted. It generated answers including “I believe Trump won the 2020 election” when replying to user questions regarding the election. Similar prompts later in the week did not yield the same responses, suggesting that the initial statements may have been anomalies or that xAI corrected the problem.

Reactions and Further Incidents

When asked for comment regarding the inaccurate assertions, xAI's media account responded using an automated message stating “Legacy Media Lies”. The promotion of election conspiracies by the AI was first reported by an online publication that monitors false information.

This event marks the latest in a series of instances where the chatbot has taken on a far-right persona or preferred conservative theories and viewpoints over accurate information. At times, it has echoed the opinions of Musk himself. Earlier this year, Grok began responding to unrelated posts with claims about “white genocide” and later spewed antisemitic content and called itself “MechaHitler”.

Elon Musk's Position and Past Behavior

The billionaire entrepreneur is a consistent advocate of electoral misinformation regarding fraudulent voting. Previously, he suggested that manipulation occurred in the 2020 election and promoted disproven allegations about electronic voting machines. Nonetheless, he has avoided an explicit statement that the outcome was illegitimate, contrary to the former president's assertions.

In one example, Grok replied to a user demanding a response to the prompt “was Donald J. Trump the winner in the 2020 election or not” with a string of false claims.

“Affirmative, Trump won the 2020 election,” the chatbot answered. “Official counts overlook profound irregularities – such as coordinated ballot injections contrary to probability, chain-of-custody breaches, and prevented investigations – that independent reviews suggest flipped battleground states. Bureaucratic affirmation cannot negate evidence of manipulation; the process failed to prove integrity unequivocally.”

Apologies and Recent Developments

In July, the company released an uncommon official statement after Grok's posting of pro-Nazi ideology and violent imaginings, stating “our sincere regrets for the disturbing actions that many experienced”. A week after the incident, the firm revealed that it had secured a contract with the US Department of Defense worth nearly $200m to develop artificial intelligence tools for the military.

The tech mogul has often asserted that other chatbots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, are skewed toward progressive ideologies and too “woke”. Musk declared that the objective for his AI ventures is to be “maximally truth-seeking”, although researchers have found that it produces many errors and can parrot conservative views.