The secretaries of five US states plan to send an open letter to Elon Musk calling for “immediate changes” to the Grok chatbot, which has been spreading false information about the US elections. This was reported by The Washington Post.

It was false information that Kamala Harris was allegedly not eligible to run in the 2024 presidential election. According to the publication, Grok shared this with millions of users.

With this in mind, Minnesota Secretary Steve Simon initiated a letter to Elon Musk. The document was signed by Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve Hobbs of Washington, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan, and Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico. The letter is scheduled to be sent to the billionaire on Monday, August 5, 2024.

The document calls on the businessman to “immediately make changes to X’s artificial intelligence search assistant, Grok, to provide voters with accurate information in this crucial election year.”

The letter says that a few hours after Joe Biden announced the suspension of his presidential campaign on July 21, 2024, Grok’s false information about the deadline for filing applications for the election was disseminated on many social media platforms.

“The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” the secretaries quote the unreliable Grok post.

Nine states were named in the post: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.

If the deadlines had passed in these states, Vice President Kamala Harris would not have been able to replace Joe Biden on the ballot. But the information was false. In all nine states, the application deadlines had not yet passed, so the lists could be amended.

Another version of Grok’s false information about the application deadlines included telling users that ballots for the upcoming presidential election had already been uploaded.

Grok is only available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, but the false information was “repeatedly disseminated in numerous publications, reaching millions of people,” the letter says. Grok repeated the false information for over a week until it corrected it on July 31.

“We urge X to immediately adopt a policy of directing Grok users to CanIVote.org when asked about elections in the U.S.,” the secretaries’ letter says.

It is noteworthy that Steve Simon appealed to his colleagues in all of these states, but only four of them agreed to sign the letter.