A Musk chatbot spread falsehood about WA elections. The secretary of state wants it fixed.

On the eve of the state’s primary, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs warned voters to be wary of “dubious” election material, expressing concern that “a deluge of manipulated and false information may be inserted into social media from foreign actors and other sources.”

As artificial intelligence gets cheaper and easier to use by those with malicious intentions, the “rest of us must be careful to verify what we see before we take it to heart,” he said in a statement Monday.

While Hobbs’ comments came with Washington voters casting ballots in the Aug. 6 primary, they were aimed at elections in general as this is a year when the nation is choosing a new president.

Hobbs spoke out shortly after he and four other secretaries of state called on Elon Musk in an open letter to “immediately implement changes” to the AI search assistant Grok on Musk’s social media platform X, citing its generating of wrong information that ballot deadlines in Washington and eight other states had passed.

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/08/05/a-chatbot-spread-falsehood-about-wa-elections-the-secretary-of-state-wants-it-fixed/