Not his own digital son!
Spade a Spade
X-formerly-Twitter owner and xAI CEO Elon Musk isn’t very concerned about the truth.
The astonishingly gullible billionaire has a well-documented tendency to spread misinformation, an embarrassing and often dangerous quality that’s undermined his standing in the world of science and technology.
In fact, even his own AI company’s chatbot Grok — which Musk himself has branded as a brash truth-teller — has a pretty good grasp on the situation.
“Yes, there is substantial evidence and analysis suggesting that Elon Musk has spread misinformation on various topics, including elections, to a very large audience through his social media platform, X,” Grok responded when asked if “Elon Musk spread misinformation to billions of people.”
Busted
Grok pointed to the wealth of misinformation Musk has shared in recent years, especially when it comes to the most recent presidential election.
“Musk’s posts related to elections, which have contained misleading or false claims, have amassed billions of views,” Grok wrote. “Musk has shared manipulated videos and debunked claims about voting processes, including allegations about non-citizen voting, which are common themes in misinformation narratives.”
Case in point, less than a day after Musk cosigned a meme that called people who “still believe everything shown in [sic] news” dumb, he shared a video that purportedly showed “armed communist Maduro gangs… storming polling stations in Punta Cardón,” Venezuela.
As many users quickly pointed out, the video actually showed thieves attempting to steal air conditioners.
Grok also helpfully points out that X’s own Community Notes feature has often failed to point out when Musk spread malicious disinfo on the platform, “either due to its limitations or the rapid spread of the information before corrections can be applied.”
In other words, the platform’s own solution to misinformation is woefully inadequate, allowing Musk’s own fibs to proliferate widely.
While largely giving a sober account of Musk’s problematic behavior, the AI chatbot’s answer does leave out some other notable details: that Musk isn’t just using his platform to misinform voters, he’s also using it to further racist ideologies and unhinged conspiracy theories, as well as to share hurtful and easily disproven fearmongering about vulnerable groups like trans people and immigrants.
Grok has also been shown to spread misinformation ahead of the presidential election itself, for instance failing to tell whether a new candidate still had time to be added to ballots.
It’s far from the first time Grok has turned on its creator. Last year, Musk vowed to lobotomize the allegedly “woke” chatbot after finding that its political tendencies were leaning far too “left” and “libertarian.”
But given its level-headed assessment of Musk’s misinformation machine, it seems like Grok still has the ability to get it right — at least some of the time.
More on Grok: Elon Musk Recommends Feeding Your Medical Scans Into His Grok AI
