OLYMPIA — Washington's secretary of state joined counterparts from four other states to ask Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, to update the site's AI search assistant to direct users to legitimate information about the election.
The letter comes a day before voting in Washington's primary closes.
The platform's AI search assistant, Grok, generated false information about ballot deadlines in Washington and eight other states that was shared on social media, the Washington Secretary of State's Office said.
Late last month, Musk posted a video of Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, that appeared to have been manipulated.
"If the owner of a social media platform themself is going to share misleading material, it signals to the rest of us that other materials allowed there may not be trustworthy," said Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs.
Hobbs and the secretaries of state from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania are asking that Grok direct voters seeking information about elections to CanIVote.org, a nonpartisan site created by state elections officials to show eligible voters how and where they can vote.
The administrators of ChatGPT and OpenAI already send people searching for information about the election to the site, Hobbs' office said.
Washington voters face a Tuesday deadline at 8 p.m. to turn in their ballots for the state's primary election.
Hobbs said he was concerned about "a deluge of manipulated and false information" on social media and urged Washington voters to seek out "trusted information sources," including established news outlets and official government institutions. Voters can get information about the election from the Secretary of State's elections website and county election offices.
"Artificial intelligence is getting easier and cheaper to manipulate for a broad number of malicious actors," he said. "The rest of us must be careful to verify what we see before we take it to heart."
Misinformation about elections is one aspect of the growing concern about the risks of generative artificial intelligence, and Hobbs' office says that deepfakes have already made their way into state and local elections in the U.S.
A deepfake video falsely asserted the governor of Utah had been involved in signature-gathering fraud, fake videos of Harris and President Joe Biden were circulated earlier this summer, and during the presidential primary, a deepfake robocall of Biden that made the rounds was intended to discourage New Hampshire voters from participating.
Last year, Hobbs requested, and the Legislature passed a bill that created guardrails around the use of deepfakes in political campaigning, requiring disclosures on manipulated videos and allowing candidates targeted by deepfakes that weren't disclosed as such to sue for damages.
Three-quarters of Washington voters are either very or somewhat concerned about the creation and distribution of deepfakes and rumors in the 2024 election, according to a recent poll commissioned by The Seattle Times in partnership with KING 5 and the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public.
Fifty-seven percent of registered voters said social media platforms should restrict accounts or content that share rumors, conspiracy theories or misleading information that could undermine trust in voting in U.S. elections.
The poll of 801 registered voters was conducted between July 10 and 13 and has a credibility interval of 4.6-4.7 percentage points.
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