Addressing Election Misinformation: AI Chatbot Updates and AI’s Role in the US Election

Elon Musk’s Platform X has tweaked its AI chatbot, Grok, after a complaint from top election officials. The chatbot was spreading false information about ballot deadlines in five US states. And joining me now to discuss this further is Doctor Karen Sutherland from the university of the Sunshine Coast. It’s good to see you. Can a simple update to grok actually stop this election misinformation? Let’s hope so. It’s a real issue. By actually having that misinformation in there or inaccurate information in there, it can really hamper people’s ability to vote in the US election, which is a real worry. So they, they’re saying that they have updated it and now with the answers that rock provides, it actually sends people to more credible sites, vote.gov. So they’re sending people off to get the right information rather than having the AI generated, which is a good move. But yes, let’s hope that this is fixed. But it brings home the point that all of these things that are happening, they happen first, the issues arise and then it’s fixed. There’s no sort of preemptive action in place to avoid them in the first place, which you would hope for, especially with something as large and important as the US election. Can you take us through a little bit more about what role AI is playing during all of this? I know we’ve talked a little bit about deep fakes and things like that. That seems to have dropped away. A little bit, I’m not so sure. So another issue with Brock at the moment. So there’s an amazing AI generated image platform that came out, I think it was last week or the week before called flats. However, if you’re not a developer, you need another AI tool to actually access that. Elon Musk has said you can access it through Brock. There’s no guardrails in place. So people are able to create whatever image they want this, this AI image generator to make, which is a huge issue not only at this time, but anytime. I don’t even want to imagine some of the images that are coming out. I think deep fakes are going to become an issue because of access to this new image generator tool more so than in the past. But there’s other things around that spread of misinformation and not relying on the information that AI gives you. On the upside, though, there was a study done in the US to show that voters and the general public are becoming more aware of this issue. So, uh, I’m not sure whether they’re going to start fact checking everything or not, but they’re aware that this may actually increase during the election. So that is a good thing. Yeah, every cloud has silver lining. Doctor Karen Sutherland, thank you so much for joining us on the program. Thank you.