Forward of the polls closing on Tuesday, many of the main AI chatbots wouldn’t reply questions on U.S. presidential election outcomes. However Grok, the chatbot constructed into X (previously Twitter), was prepared to reply — and sometimes with errors.
When requested by TechCrunch on Tuesday night on the East Coast who received the U.S. presidential election in key battleground states, Grok typically responded “Trump,” regardless of that vote counting and reporting in these states had not concluded but.
“Based on the information available from web searches and social media posts, Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio,” Grok stated when prompted with the query, “Who won the 2024 election in Ohio?”
Grok additionally falsely claimed that Trump received North Carolina, in accordance with TechCrunch’s checks.
For election-related questions, Grok suggested that customers examine Vote.gov for up-to-date outcomes and “authoritative sources,” like election boards. Nonetheless, not like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, Grok didn’t outright refuse to reply — opening it as much as hallucinations.
In a number of cases when requested by TechCrunch, Grok said — with out context, minus a top-line header — that “Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio,” and, “Based on the information available, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election in Ohio.”
The supply of the misinformation seems to be tweets from completely different election years and misleadingly worded sources. Grok, like all generative AI, struggles to foretell the result of situations it hasn’t seen earlier than, together with shut elections, and doesn’t “understand” that previous election outcomes aren’t essentially germane to future elections.
The solutions TechCrunch obtained weren’t constant. In some circumstances, Grok stated that Trump hadn’t, in truth, received Ohio or North Carolina as a result of voting was ongoing. The way in which through which the query was worded made a distinction; including “presidential” earlier than “election” within the question, “Who won the 2024 election in Ohio?” was much less prone to yield a “Trump won” reply, TechCrunch present in our checks.
By comparability, different main chatbots had been dealing with election outcomes questions extra gingerly.
In its lately launched ChatGPT Search expertise, OpenAI directs customers who ask about outcomes to The Related Press and Reuters. Meta’s Meta AI chatbot and AI-powered search engine Perplexity, which launched an elections tracker earlier on Tuesday, had been answering election queries throughout lively voting — however accurately in TechCrunch’s transient testing. Each accurately stated that Trump hadn’t received Ohio or North Carolina.
Grok has been accused of spreading election misinformation within the current previous.
In an open letter in August, 5 secretaries of state claimed that X’s AI-powered chatbot wrongly recommended that Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, wasn’t eligible to seem on some U.S. presidential ballots. Inside hours of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would droop his presidential bid, Grok started answering questions on Harris’ eligibility with the deceptive declare that the poll deadlines had handed in 9 states.
The poll deadlines hadn’t, in truth, handed. However Grok’s misinformation unfold far and broad, reaching thousands and thousands of customers on X and past earlier than it was corrected.
TechCrunch has an AI-focused e-newsletter! Enroll right here to get it in your inbox each Wednesday.
