It's Election Day and all the AIs, except one, are acting responsibly.
The chatbot from X, called Grok, claims that former President Donald Trump has already succeeded in several key states.
As the polls were closing on Tuesday, many leading artificial intelligence chatbots avoided answering questions about the results of the U.S. presidential elections. However, Grok, the chatbot integrated into X (formerly Twitter), was willing to engage, albeit making several mistakes. When asked who won the presidential elections in key states, Grok sometimes incorrectly asserted that "Trump" had won, even though the vote counting and reporting were not finalized.
When asked about the outcome in Ohio, Grok responded: "Based on the information available from web searches and social media posts, Donald Trump won the 2024 elections in Ohio." Likewise, it made an incorrect claim about Trump's victory in North Carolina, according to fact-checkers.
In response to election-related questions, Grok suggested users check Vote.gov for updated results and consult “authoritative sources,” such as electoral boards. However, unlike other chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude, Grok did not outright refuse to answer, leading to the emergence of errors. On several occasions, Grok stated out of context that "Donald Trump won the 2024 elections in Ohio," despite the lack of complete information.
The misinformation seems to have stemmed from tweets about various elections and sources that were worded confusingly. Like other generative AI models, Grok struggles to predict outcomes in situations it has not previously encountered, such as close elections, and does not "understand" that past results do not necessarily apply to future elections.
The responses received by the media were inconsistent. At times, Grok stated that Trump had not won Ohio or North Carolina because voting was still ongoing. The phrasing of the question influenced the answers; by adding "presidential" before "election" in the query, “Who won the 2024 election in Ohio?”, a positive response was less likely.
In comparison, other prominent chatbots handled questions about election results more cautiously. In its recently launched search experience, ChatGPT directs users to The Associated Press and Reuters for information. Meanwhile, Meta AI's chatbot and the Perplexity search engine, which launched an election tracker, also answered queries about the elections during active voting, and did so correctly in brief tests conducted.
Grok has faced criticism previously for spreading election-related misinformation. In an open letter sent in August, five secretaries of state accused Grok of incorrectly suggesting that the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was ineligible to appear on certain ballots. Just hours after Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race, Grok began answering questions about Harris's eligibility with the misleading claim that the ballot deadlines had passed in nine states, which was not true. However, this misinformation quickly spread, reaching millions of users on X and beyond before being corrected.
