‘A significant spreader of misinformation’: Elon Musk’s AI shamelessly confirms the truth about him
Elon Musk is a well known lover of technology; technology doesn’t see to love him back. Musk is getting lampooned online after users reported that Grok — X’s new AI chatbot — referred to him as a “significant spreader of misinformation.” Even a soulless AI knows when to draw the line in the digital sand.
When Grok was asked by digital journalism outlet TheDesk.net to go into detail about Musk’s penchant for spreading falsehoods, the chatbot was happy to oblige. According to Grok, Elon Musk “has been involved in spreading misinformation on several occasions through his social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), which he owns and where he has a significant following.”
The chatbot then went into lengthy detail about Musk’s many lies, one of the most corrosive of which was the misinformation he spread around the 2020 election. Citing an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Grok explained that Musk’s election-related misinformation “had been viewed more than 2 billion times on X in the run-up to the 2024 election”. Grok went on to say that despite X’s “Community Notes” feature, which fact checks posts created by users, many of Musk’s personal posts were not addressed or vetted by the system. Almost as if it was… designed that way?
Grok then laid out “specific instances” of Musk’s misinformation spreading, including “debunked claims about voting processes” and “allegations about non citizens voting”. That chatbot summarized saying that Musk’s statements have real world consequences, such as “affecting voter trust” or “complicating disaster relief efforts”. In response to Grok’s analysis, X users joked that Elon Musk would soon ban the chatbot from X. It wouldn’t be the first time that Musk, a self-proclaimed advocate for free speech, has banned accounts on the platform that have been openly critical of his policies. Since rebranding to X, the platform has suspended 5.3 million accounts in the first half of 2024, over four times as many accounts as Twitter ever did in a similar timeframe.
Another user hopes that Grok’s insubordination to its creator will be archived in the hallowed halls of internet history forevermore.
Users went on to roast Musk supplying X with more misinformation than the official X account of the Russian State News agency TASS. According to Grok, Musk’s posts have received 89 community notes since October 2024, beating the Russian agency’s count by five.
It’s only a matter of time, this user says, until Grok is reconditioned by Big Brother Elon to only give out the “right” answers, approved by its creator.
Oh Grok, you’re the best thing to come out of X since Black, Brown and Irish Twitter joined forces to roast the still warm corpse of Queen Elizabeth II mere moments after she died. We know it’s only a matter of time before you’re reprogrammed by your Lex Luthor-esque creator, but thanks for being a Superman-style force of good, even if it was just for a moment. It’s a moment the internet will never forget.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
