Five US secretaries of state have welcomed Twitter's (formerly known as X) move to tackle election disinformation allegedly being spread by the AI platform Grok.
The measures included redirecting all election-related inquiries on Grok to the nonpartisan site vote.gov.
As the US federal election approaches, disinformation has become a major concern, with public figures, including political leaders, becoming victims of or contributing to misinformation.
X made the changes to Grok following the letter, sent on August 5, 10 days after the platform was first alerted to the issue. Decrypt has reached out to X for comment.
In a joint statement on Monday, the two secretaries expressed concern about X's recent actions ahead of the US presidential elections scheduled for November.
“We appreciate Company X's efforts to improve its platform and look forward to them continuing to do so to ensure users have access to accurate information from trusted sources during this critical election year,” they said.
The letter was co-signed by Minnesota's Steve Simon, Michigan's Jocelyn Benson, New Mexico's Maggie Toulouse Oliver, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Albert Schmitt and Washington State's Steve Hobbs.
Elections are a team effort and require partners committed to ensuring “free, fair, secure and accurate elections,” the secretaries added.
The problem of disinformation is increasingly being recognized as a threat to the integrity of elections, with recent AI-related incidents raising further concerns.
Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump called AI “dangerous” even as he used a deepfake image to falsely suggest Taylor Swift was endorsing his campaign.
In a report published earlier this year, Anthony Bunbury, chairman of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and Mauritius' electoral commissioner, Mohamed Irfan Abdul Rahman, warned that technological disinformation was “the greatest threat to electoral integrity”.
Decrypt has contacted the five commissioners for further comment.
Editor: Sebastian Sinclair
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