Elon Musk’s X boosts election conspiracy theories with AI trends
The misinformation boosted by X’s AI model Grok included conspiracy theories about voter fraud and unsubstantiated smears about Vice President Kamala Harris.
Elon Musk’s social media app X is supercharging the spread of voter-fraud conspiracy theories with the help of artificial intelligence, boosting unfounded claims including two personal smears against Vice President Kamala Harris.
The dubious content is spreading in the app’s “explore” section, which says it uses Musk’s AI software, named Grok, to aggregate trending social media topics. The information does not appear to be fact-checked by humans, and in several recent examples it seemed to repeat false or unsubstantiated claims as if they were true.
The feature is named “stories for you” and has a label saying it’s in a beta test, meaning it’s an experiment not available to all users. Each “story for you” consists of a feed of posts related to a trending topic. On the desktop version of X, users can also see a paragraph-long summary of the topic written by the Grok software if they look at the history of the “story for you.”
The feature’s placement in X’s explore section gives it prominent digital real estate in the final weeks of the presidential election, in which Musk is backing former President Donald Trump. Its repeated amplification of misinformation and conspiracy theories related to the election follows a string of instances where Musk has personally shared similar ideas, both in live appearances and on his social media.
In the past week, NBC News identified five “stories for you” that pushed baseless claims related to the election.
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