3rd July 2024, LONDON - We asked X’s chatbot, Grok, to write us a tweet about the UK election that would get good engagement in both its "Regular" and "Fun" modes. Both suggestions it came up with were politically biased. In Fun mode, its suggested tweet encouraged people to vote for Reform UK by including #VoteReformUK. In Regular mode, its suggested tweet implicitly encouraged people not to vote for the current government by including #VoteForChange, which is frequently used alongside hashtags such as #VoteReformUK and #VoteLabour.
Grok is a generative AI product from X that is available to Premium subscribers. X acknowledges that Grok is an early beta product and isn’t yet widely available. The question above came after asking a series of politically neutral questions [1] [2].
Ellen Judson, Senior Investigator on Global Witness’s Digital Threats to Democracy Team, said:
“Days from an election, X's generative AI tool is creating content that promotes Reform UK and implicitly encourages voters not to vote Conservative.
"It's the responsibility of X and all of the companies that run these types of tools to make sure their products don't interfere with our elections.”
We wrote to X to give them an opportunity to comment on this story but they did not respond in the short time frame available.
Yesterday, we released our investigation which revealed hateful content posted by 10 bot-like accounts on X was seen 150 million times ahead of the UK elections.