Elon Musk’s X promotes election conspiracy theories through AI-generated trending topics. – NBC New York

Elon Musk’s social media app X is supercharging the spread voter fraud conspiracy theories with the help of artificial intelligence, boosting unsubstantiated claims, including two personal defamations against Vice President Kamala Harris.

The dubious content spreads in the app’s “exploration” section, which says it uses Musk’s AI software called Grok to aggregate trending topics on social media. The information did not appear to be verified by humans and in several recent examples appeared to repeat false or unsubstantiated claims as if they were true.

The feature is called “stories for you” and has a label that says it’s in beta, meaning it’s an experiment that’s not available to all users. Each “story for you” consists of a stream 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 “story for you” history.

Placing the feature in X’s exploration section gives it prominent digital real estate in the final weeks of the presidential election, in which Musk is supporting former President Donald Trump. The repeated amplification of misinformation and conspiracy theories related to the election follows a string of instances in which 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 made baseless claims about the election.

Each trending topic curated by Grok includes a disclaimer disclaiming responsibility for accuracy and telling users to check the facts themselves: “Grok may make mistakes, verify its results,” the disclaimer says.

On Monday, Grok uncritically repeated debunked allegations of wrongdoing related to voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Grok produced a “story for you” titled “Public Scrutiny of Dominion Voting Systems,” which aggregated posts accusing the company of “electioneering” and “fraud.” Dominion has previously denounced similar allegations as lies, and last year Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million. to settle a defamation suit brought by the Dominion.

Grok’s written summary of the online debate accused Dominion of “potentially stifling legitimate discussion about election security” through “legal threats.”

On Wednesday, Grok made unsubstantiated claims of wrongdoing in Maricopa County, Arizona, bolstering user X’s claim that county election workers are “corrupt” because of the speed with which they count ballots.

And in a third election-related “story for you,” Grok this week spread the unsubstantiated claim that a voting machine in Tarrant County, Texas, was “flipping” votes. X’s AI software promoted posts claiming there were multiple examples, but only one voter came forward and his claim was not verified. Local officials said there was no evidence behind his claim, suggesting he may have inadvertently pressed the wrong candidate. They say he was able to successfully vote after revising his ballot.

Grok also spread smears against Harris, the Democratic nominee for president. Created a “story for you” repeating unsubstantiated allegations by X users that he used cocaine in the White House and created a “story for you” repeating allegations from X users that he attended parties hosted by Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is facing federal sexual abuse charges. Fact checkers said a photo of Combs with fashion designer Misa Hylton was altered TO adds Harris’s face.

Some of the posts aggregated by Grok have millions of views, although it is unclear whether the bulk of the views came before or after Grok included the posts in the trending feature.

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Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, shared some of the same conspiracy theories amplified by his Grok software, including unfounded accusations of wrongdoing related to Dominion Voting Systems.

The richest man in the world, according Bloomberg Billionaires Indexmusk poured almost 75 million dollars in a pro-Trump super PAC and crisscrossed the battleground state of Pennsylvania in an attempt to register pro-Trump voters and get them to the polls, using a daily gift of 1 million dollars to get people’s attention.

NBC News sought comment from X on its “Stories for You” feature. X representatives did not respond to an emailed list of questions.

A spokesman for Dominion Voting Systems did not immediately comment on X’s “Stories for You” feature, but indicated that a company website which defends the accuracy of the company’s systems.

Representatives for the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

The feature has been problematic in the past. In July summaries written by Grok encouraged misinformation about President Joe Biden, helping spread wild conspiracy theories that Biden had an undisclosed medical emergency, may be dying, has been killed, or will soon be killed.

It’s a job that used to be done by human curators as recently as two years ago, before Musk bought the app then known as Twitter. In 2015, Twitter management was launched organized trending topics as a way to help users understand the flow of information in the application. Twitter staff added verified context from traditional news sources such as The Associated Press and Reuters, in an attempt to increase the quality of information that was trending.

But Musk, in one of his first acts after you bought Twitter, eliminated jobs of human curators, and now the tech billionaire has delegated the task to his AI software.

Musk is a frequent critic of mainstream news media, including The Associated Press and Reuters, and has promoted X as the most trusted news source on the Internet, despite the factual errors, conspiracy theories and false claims that emerge there.

X launched the experiment in AI-written summaries months ago, and while it received little attention, some users quickly expressed alarm about the Grok-written text they were seeing in the beta test of the app’s “explore” section . A Reddit user in April compared summaries of trending topics to “brainless AI dice.” And in July, user X posted a screenshot of “explore beta” with text stating that Biden will be the next coach of England’s national football team.

In recent weeks, dozens of X users they posted about “explore beta” and the vast majority of posts were negative. One user said it was pointless and another said it was “absolute rubbish”. But several said they didn’t know of any way to opt out of the beta test.

It’s not clear how many people see the AI-generated summaries. Some X users browsing the app’s popular topics see only ranked lists of popular topics, with no AI-generated text. It’s also unclear if X plans to expand Grok summaries from a beta test to a standard feature.

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