On June 9, soon after United States President Donald Trump dispatched US National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests taking place over immigration raids, California Governor Gavin Newsom posted two photographs on X. The images showed dozens of troopers wearing the National Guard uniform sleeping on the floor in a cramped space, with a caption that decried Trump for disrespecting the troops.X users immediately turned to Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, which is integrated directly into X, to fact-check the veracity of the image. For that, they tagged @grok in a reply to the tweet in question, triggering an automatic response from the AI.
“You’re sharing fake photos,” one user posted, citing a screenshot of Grok’s response that claimed a reverse image search could not find the exact source. In another instance, Grok said the images were recycled from 2021, when former US President Joe Biden, a Democrat, withdrew troops from Afghanistan. Melissa O’Connor, a conspiracy-minded influencer, cited a ChatGPT analysis that also said the images were from the Afghanistan evacuation.
However, non-partisan fact-checking organisation PolitiFact found that both AI citations were incorrect. The images shared by Newsom were real, and had been published in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The bot-sourced erroneous fact checks formed the basis for hours of cacophonous debates on X, before Grok corrected itself.
Unlike OpenAI’s standalone app ChatGPT, Grok’s integration into X offers users immediate access to real-time AI answers without quitting the …
