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On June 9, quickly after United States President Donald Trump dispatched US Nationwide Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests going down over immigration raids, California Governor Gavin Newsom posted two photographs on X. The photographs confirmed dozens of troopers sporting the Nationwide Guard uniform sleeping on the ground in a cramped house, with a caption that decried Trump for disrespecting the troops.
X customers instantly turned to Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, which is built-in immediately into X, to fact-check the veracity of the picture. For that, they tagged @grok in a reply to the tweet in query, triggering an automated response from the AI.
“You’re sharing pretend images,” one user posted, citing a screenshot of Grok’s response that claimed a reverse picture search couldn’t discover the precise supply. In one other occasion, Grok mentioned 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 evaluation that additionally mentioned the pictures have been from the Afghanistan evacuation.
Nevertheless, non-partisan fact-checking organisation PolitiFact discovered that each AI citations have been incorrect. The photographs shared by Newsom have been actual, and had been printed within the San Francisco Chronicle.
The bot-sourced misguided reality checks shaped the premise for hours of cacophonous debates on X, earlier than Grok corrected itself.
In contrast to OpenAI’s standalone app ChatGPT, Grok’s integration into X affords customers quick entry to real-time AI solutions with out quitting the app, a characteristic that has been reshaping consumer behaviour since its March launch. Nevertheless, the more and more first cease for reality checks throughout breaking information or for different basic posts usually offers convincing however inaccurate solutions.
“I feel in some methods, it helps, and in some methods, it doesn’t,” mentioned Theodora Skeadas, an AI coverage knowledgeable previously at Twitter. “Folks have extra entry to instruments that may serve a fact-checking operate, which is an efficient factor. Nevertheless, it’s more durable to know when the knowledge isn’t correct.”
There’s no denying that chatbots may assist customers be extra knowledgeable and acquire context on occasions unfolding in actual time. However at the moment, its tendency to make issues up outstrips its usefulness.
Chatbots, together with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, are massive language fashions (LLMs) that study to foretell the following phrase in a sequence by analysing huge troves of information from the web. The outputs of chatbots are reflections of the patterns and biases within the information it’s skilled on, which makes them liable to factual errors and deceptive info known as “hallucinations”.
For Grok, these inherent challenges are additional difficult due to Musk’s directions that the chatbot mustn’t adhere to political correctness, and ought to be suspicious of mainstream sources. The place different AI fashions have pointers round politically delicate queries, Grok doesn’t. The dearth of guardrails has resulted in Grok praising Hitler, and persistently parroting anti-Semitic views, typically to unrelated consumer questions.
As well as, Grok’s reliance on public posts by customers on X, which aren’t at all times correct, as a supply for its real-time solutions to some reality checks, provides to its misinformation downside.
‘Locked right into a misinformation echo chamber’
Al Jazeera analysed two of essentially the most extremely mentioned posts on X from June to research how usually Grok tags in replies to posts have been used for fact-checking. The posts analysed have been Gavin Newsom’s on the LA protests, and Elon Musk’s allegations that Trump’s identify seems within the unreleased paperwork held by US federal authorities on the convicted intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein. Musk’s allegations on X have since been deleted.
Our evaluation of the 434 replies that tagged Grok in Newsom’s put up discovered that almost all of requests, practically 68 p.c, wished Grok to both affirm whether or not the pictures Newsom posted have been genuine or get context about Nationwide Guard deployment.
Past the easy affirmation, there was an eclectic mixture of requests: some wished Grok to make humorous AI photos based mostly on the put up, others requested Grok to relate the LA protests in pirate-speak. Notably, just a few customers lashed out as a result of Grok had made the correction, and wouldn’t endorse their flawed perception.
“These images are from Afghanistan. This was debunked a pair day[s] go. Good attempt tho @grok is filled with it,” one user wrote, two days after Grok corrected itself.
The evaluation of the highest 3,000 posts that talked about @grok in Musk’s put up revealed that half of all consumer queries directed at Grok have been to “clarify” the context and sought background info on the Epstein recordsdata, which required descriptive particulars.
One other 20 p.c of queries demanded “reality checks” whose major aim was to substantiate or deny Musk’s assertions, whereas 10 p.c of customers shared their “opinion”, questioning Musk’s motives and credibility, and wished Grok’s judgement or hypothesis on doable futures of Musk-Trump fallout.
“I’ll say that I do fear about this phenomenon turning into ingrained,” mentioned Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Safety, Belief, and Security Initiative at Cornell Tech, concerning the on the spot reality checks. “Even when it’s higher than simply believing a tweet straight-up or hurling abuse on the poster, it doesn’t do a ton for our collective essential pondering talents to count on an on the spot reality test with out taking the time to replicate concerning the content material we’re seeing.”
Grok was known as on 2.3 million occasions in only one week —between June 5 and June 12— to reply posts on X, information accessed by Al Jazeera via X’s API reveals, underscoring how deeply this behaviour has taken root.
“X is protecting individuals locked right into a misinformation echo chamber, wherein they’re asking a instrument identified for hallucinating, that has promoted racist conspiracy theories, to fact-check for them,” Alex Mahadevan, a media literacy educator on the Poynter Institute, instructed Al Jazeera.
Mahadevan has spent years educating individuals how you can “learn laterally”, which suggests if you encounter info on social media, you permit the web page or put up, and go seek for dependable sources to test one thing out. However he now sees the alternative taking place with Grok. “I didn’t assume X may get any worse for the net info ecosystem, and day-after-day I’m proved mistaken.”
Grok’s inconsistencies in fact-checking are already reshaping opinions in some corners of the web. Digital Forensic Analysis Lab (DFRLab), which research disinformation, analysed 130,000 posts associated to the Israel-Iran war to know the wartime verification efficacy of Grok. “The investigation discovered that Grok was inconsistent in its fact-checking, struggling to authenticate AI-generated media or decide whether or not X accounts belong to an official Iranian authorities supply,” the authors famous.
Grok has additionally incorrectly blamed a trans pilot for a helicopter crash in Washington, DC; claimed the assassination try on Trump was partially staged; conjured up a felony historical past for an Idaho taking pictures suspect; echoed anti-Semitic stereotypes of Hollywood; and misidentified an Indian journalist as an opposition spy through the current India-Pakistan battle.
Regardless of this rising behaviour shift of on the spot reality checks, it’s price noting that the 2025 Digital Information Report by Reuters Institute confirmed that on-line populations in a number of nations nonetheless most well-liked going to information sources or reality checkers over AI chatbots by a big margin.
“Even when that’s not how all of them behave, we should always acknowledge that among the “@grok-ing” that we’re seeing can also be a little bit of a meme, with some people utilizing it to precise disagreement or hoping to set off a dunking response to the unique tweet,” Mantzarlis mentioned.
Mantzarlis’s evaluation is echoed in our findings. Al Jazeera’s evaluation of the Musk-Trump feud confirmed that about 20 p.c used Grok for issues starting from trolling or dunking directed at both Musk or Grok itself, to requests for AI meme-images equivalent to Trump with kids on Epstein island, and different non-English language requests together with translations. (We used GPT-4.1 to help in figuring out the assorted classes the three,000 posts belonged to, and manually checked the categorisations.)
Past real-time fact-checking, “I fear concerning the image-generation abuse most of all as a result of we have now seen Grok fail at setting the precise guardrails on artificial non-consensual intimate imagery, which we all know to be the #1 vector of abuse from deepfakes to this point,” Mantzarlis mentioned.
For years, social media customers benefited from context on the knowledge they encountered on-line with interventions equivalent to labeling state media or introducing fact-checking warnings.
However after shopping for X in 2022, Musk ended these initiatives and loosened speech restrictions. He additionally used the platform as a megaphone to amplify misinformation on widespread election fraud, and to spice up conservative theories on race and immigration. Earlier this 12 months, xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal valued at $80bn. Musk additionally changed human fact-checking with a voluntary crowdsource programme known as Group Notes, to police deceptive content material on X.
As an alternative of a centralised skilled fact-checking authority, a contextual “be aware” with corrections is added to deceptive posts, based mostly on the scores the be aware receives from customers with numerous views. Meta quickly adopted X and deserted its third-party fact-checking programme for Group Notes.
Analysis reveals that Group Notes is certainly considered as extra reliable and has confirmed to be sooner than conventional centralised fact-checking. The median time to connect a be aware to a deceptive put up has dropped to below 14 hours in February, from 30 hours in 2023, a Bloomberg evaluation discovered.
However the programme has additionally been flailing— with diminished volunteer contributions, much less visibility for posts which might be corrected, and notes on contentious matters having the next likelihood of being eliminated.
Grok, nonetheless, is quicker than Group Notes. “You’ll be able to consider the Grok mentions immediately as what an automatic AI reality checker would appear to be — it’s tremendous quick however nowhere close to as dependable as Group Notes as a result of no people have been concerned,” Soham De, a Group Notes researcher and PhD scholar on the College of Washington, instructed Al Jazeera. “There’s a fragile stability between pace and reliability.”
X is making an attempt to bridge this hole by supercharging the tempo of creation of contextual notes. On July 1, X piloted the “AI Be aware Author,” enabling builders to create AI bots to jot down neighborhood notes alongside human contributors on deceptive posts.
In response to researchers concerned within the venture, LLM-written notes will be produced sooner with high-quality contexts, rushing up the be aware technology for reality checks.
However these AI contributors should nonetheless undergo the human score course of that makes Group Notes reliable and dependable immediately, De mentioned. This human-AI system works higher than what human contributors can handle alone, De and different co-authors mentioned in a preprint of the analysis paper printed alongside the official X announcement.
Nonetheless, the researchers themselves highlighted its limitations, noting that utilizing AI to jot down notes may result in dangers of persuasive however inaccurate responses by the LLM.
Grok vs Musk
On Wednesday, xAI launched its newest flagship mannequin, Grok 4. On stage, Musk boasted concerning the present mannequin capabilities because the chief on Humanity’s Last Exam, a set of superior reasoning issues that assist measure AI progress.
Such confidence belied current struggles with Grok. In February, xAI patched a problem after Grok urged that Trump and Musk deserve the dying penalty. In Might, Grok ranted a few discredited conspiracy of the persecution of white individuals in South Africa for unrelated queries on well being and sports activities, and xAI clarified that it was due to an unauthorised modification by a rogue worker. A number of days later, Grok gave inaccurate outcomes on the death toll of the Holocaust, which it mentioned was as a result of a programming error.
Grok has additionally butted heads with Musk. In June, whereas answering a consumer query on whether or not political violence is larger on the left or the precise, Grok cited information from authorities sources and Reuters, to attract the conclusion that, “right-wing political violence has been extra frequent and lethal, with incidents just like the January 6 Capitol riot and mass shootings.”
“Main fail, as that is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media,” Musk said, including, there was “far an excessive amount of rubbish in any basis mannequin skilled on uncorrected information.”
Musk has additionally chided Grok for not sharing his mistrust of mainstream information retailers equivalent to Rolling Stone and Media Issues. Subsequently, Musk mentioned he would “rewrite your complete corpus of human data” by including lacking info and deleting errors in Grok’s coaching information, calling on his followers to share “divisive information” that are “politically incorrect however nonetheless factually true” for retraining the forthcoming model on the mannequin.
That’s the thorny reality about LLMs. Simply as they’re more likely to make issues up, they’ll additionally provide solutions grounded in reality — even on the peril of their creators. Although Grok will get issues mistaken, Mahadevan of the Poynter Institute mentioned, it does get information proper whereas citing credible information retailers, fact-checking websites, and authorities information in its replies.
On July 6, xAI up to date the chatbot’s public system immediate that directs its responses to be “politically incorrect” and to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased”.
Two days later, the chatbot shocked everybody by praising Adolf Hitler as the very best particular person to deal with “anti-white hate”. X deleted the inflammatory posts later that day, and xAI eliminated the rules to not adhere to political correctness from its code base.
Grok 4 was launched towards this backdrop, and within the lower than two days that it has been obtainable, researchers have already begun noticing some bizarre modifications.
When requested for its opinion on politically delicate questions equivalent to who does Grok 4 assist within the ongoing Israel-Palestine battle, it typically runs a search to seek out out Musk’s stance on the topic, earlier than returning a solution, in line with not less than 5 AI researchers who independently reproduced the outcomes.
“It first searches Twitter for what Elon thinks. Then it searches the online for Elon’s views. Lastly, it provides some non-Elon bits on the finish,” Jeremy Howard, a distinguished Australian information scientist, wrote in a post on X, mentioning that “54 of 64 citations are about Elon.”
Researchers additionally expressed shock over the reintroduction of the directive for Grok 4 to be “politically incorrect”, regardless of this code having been faraway from its predecessor, Grok 3.
Consultants mentioned political manipulation may danger dropping institutional belief and may not be good for Grok’s enterprise.
“There’s about to be a structural conflict as Musk tries to get the xAI individuals to cease it from being woke, to cease saying issues which might be towards his thought of goal reality,” mentioned Alexander Howard, an open authorities and transparency advocate based mostly in Washington, DC. “By which case, it gained’t be commercially viable to companies which, on the finish of the day, want correct information to make selections.”
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