Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen declined to join a letter to Elon Musk from the top election officials of five other states urging the tech billionaire to point users of his social media site X to accurate election information after X’s AI chatbot gave false information, according to his Minnesota counterpart.
After President Biden announced on July 21 that he was withdrawing from the 2024 race, the AI chatbot Grok posted that the Democrat replacing Biden as the party’s nominee would not be able to get on the ballot in nine states, including Alabama, five secretaries of state wrote in a letter Monday to Musk and led by Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon.
“The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” the Grok post stated, according to the letter. “Some of these states include: 1. Alabama 2. Indiana 3. Michigan 4. Minnesota 5. New Mexico 6. Ohio 7. Pennsylvania 8. Texas 9. Washington.”
Alabama’s ballot access deadline did not pass.
On July 21 — the day Biden dropped his re-election bid — Allen told AL.com that Aug. 23 is the deadline to certify the nominees for president and vice president.
The letter sent to Musk on Monday said the Grok post also gave “false” information for the eight other states.
“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 stated.
Simon and the four other attorneys generals who signed the letter are Democrats.
Allen is a Republican. His office was contacted before the letter was sent to Musk but “they declined to be included,” according to a Simon spokeswoman.
Efforts by AL.com to reach Allen’s office were unsuccessful.
The letter called on Musk to have Grok posts direct users who ask about the 2024 election to CanIVote.org in wake of the misinformation. The nonpartisan website run by the National Association of Secretaries of State “was created by state election officials to help eligible voters figure out how and where to go vote,” the site states.
While Grok is only available to users of X Premium and X Premium+ — paid tiers of the social media site — the post “has been captured and shared repeatedly in multiple posts – reaching millions of people,” according to the letter.
Meanwhile, the AI chatbot “continued to repeat this false information for more than a week until it was corrected” last Wednesday, the secretaries wrote.
They highlighted a two-year-old X post from Musk in which the tech billionaire wrote the social media site “needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission.”
“We hope that you live up to this mission,” the letter states.
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Publish date : 2024-08-05 14:16:00
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