OPINION: Tech bros play fast and loose with spreading misinformation

It was unbelievable, which is the opposite of what real news should be.

But believe it: Elon Musk is pushing errors and false news into the heads of people around the world. Whether for his personal profit, personal ego or personal fun, it’s irresponsible and dangerous.

Musk, a serial entrepreneur who is as flaky as cold cereal, believes Grok, his artificial intelligence service peddled through X, formerly known as Twitter, should be a news source.

“What we’re doing on the X platform is, we are aggregating. We’re using AI to sum up the aggregated input from millions of users,” Musk said at an ad industry gathering in June, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal last week. “I think this is really going to be the new model of news.”

Mr. X’s model failed miserably at accuracy last week.

In the hours after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, Grok at one point told the world that Vice President Kamala Harris had been shot. Oops.

The AI aggregator, in its rush to misjudgment, also incorrectly named the suspected shooter and erroneously reported that the man was a member of antifa, a loose network of people on the far left which far-right conservatives often blame for much of the political and social violence in the country.

Another one of Grok’s aggravating aggregated “news” headlines announced: “Actor ‘Home Alone 2′ Shot at Trump Rally?” Yes, Trump made a cameo appearance in the 1992 movie “Home Alone 2.” It appears Grok scraped the movie reference while it was scraping social media for news of the shooting and recast the news in the headline style of a supermarket tabloid.

After the presidential debate last month between Trump and President Joe Biden, a Grok headline announced, “Newsom Triumphs in Recent Debate,” confusing the California governor with the real candidates, even though Newsom wasn’t anywhere on the stage. And people think Biden is confused.

The AI news gatherer with the funny name comes from Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, and is offered to subscribers of X, which Musk also owns. The inventor/investor has said Grok can automate thinking and is faster than traditional news outlets, which Musk has called unreliable. No doubt Grok knows unreliable when it sees it.

The software summarizes the news and writes headlines after thumbing through social media posts from millions of users. No matter whether those posts are accurate, jokes or rumors — they all look the same to Grok.

Evidence of just how much trust Grok has in its own work comes at the bottom of its summaries: “This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”

At least it admits to making mistakes, though its attitude seems to be: No harm, no foul. Life goes on. We’ll have more mistakes tomorrow, but who cares. X’s marketing language says Grok is an “AI search assistant with a twist of humor,” as if erroneously reporting the news is a harmless joke.

Musk is one of the world’s most energetic thinkers and social tinkerers. He sees himself as a disrupter, someone who forces change in society. He treats the world as his own experimental lab — without consequences. His list of success stories includes electric vehicles, massive battery packs and space launches.

I wonder if Grok can do a better job of reporting on its owner’s successes than it can on the rest of the world’s news.

Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.

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