With the U.S. presidential election finally closing in, Elon Musk's aversion to moderation is causing more headaches especially with X's new Grok AI chatbot that has become the center of controversy over its capacity to disseminate election-related misinformation.

Five U.S. secretaries of state sent an open letter today to Musk and X calling for correction of false information being communicated by Grok, and particularly advised on voting processes.

According to the letter :

Within hours after President Joe Biden suspended his presidential campaign on 21st July 2024, Grok released false information about ballots deadlines shared across various social media platforms. Grok posted the following: "The ballot deadline has already passed in several states for the 2024 election.". Some of those states are: 1. Alabama 2. Indiana 3. Michigan 4. Minnesota 5. New Mexico 6. Ohio 7. Pennsylvania 8. Texas 9. Washington. That's false. In all nine states the opposite is true: The ballots are not closed, and upcoming ballot deadlines would allow for changes to candidates listed on the ballot for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States.

The letter also points out that although Grok lives only for the paying X Premium members, the data of the bot was shared with the others and still beyond the said group, which exposed more harm to the misinformation.

"Grok, apart from this, kept sharing false information until it was corrected on 31 July 2024."

Secretaries of state comment that although AI chatbots are accident-prone, the accuracy related to voting information is essential; therefore, X should be making sure such questions do not erringly generate reports.

OpenAI teamed with the National Association of Secretaries of State in order to ensure that voters will have access to correct, up-to-date elections information when making use of AI tools. ChatGPT has been designed to refer users to CanIVote.org - a nonpartisan resource which is provided by professional election administrators from both major parties.

It will be amusing to see how Musk and X react to the letter since Musk, for several years now, has lambasted previous Twitter administrations for precisely the kind of involvement with political bodies that the letter claims are required to better its moderation systems which had been called for by the political bodies.

A key aspect of X's "Twitter Files" expose, which came out shortly after Musk took over, and based on internal communications from the Twitter team was the fact that the U.S. government had authorities who had requested the Trust and Safety group at Twitter suppress specific comments and profiles which had criticized COVID mitigation measures.

Former Twitter employees argued that they didn't have to comply with those requests, and in most cases, did not censor speech at the behest of government officials. But Musk and Co. have spun this into evidence of a "censorship regime" and proof of why he believed he had to rescue Twitter to ensure the free speech principles are safeguarded.

Those requests, as noted, are quite similar to this state secretaries' proposal .
So will Musk see this as government overreach and allow Grok to continue spreading lies and fantasy or will this be taken action on by the X team, thus (at least per Musk's prior intent) enabling censorship within his "non-woke" AI bot?

Really, we already learned the lesson of unchallenged election misinformation, which led to a wave of reforms at social platforms in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. But Elon appears largely opposed to those changes and will likely see many of the most damaging features of that campaign repeated, on X at least.

At the same time, Musk has clearly taken sides for the campaign, so, there also appears to be less reason for X to take an action on matters of concern which could serve to advance the campaign of the Republicans.

It's the first of many questions that will be raised about X's new "free speech" policies as we move deeper into the campaign and another concern that could lead to regulatory action against X at some stage.