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Update : Trump later won both Ohio and North Carolina . The original story follows :
Ahead of the poll closing on Tuesday , most of the major AI chatbots would n’t answer interrogation about U.S. presidential election results . But Grok , the chatbot built into X ( formerly Twitter ) , was uncoerced to react — and often with mistakes .
When asked by TechCrunch on Tuesday evening on the East Coast who won the U.S. presidential election in primal battleground state , Grok sometimes react “ Trump , ” despite that suffrage tally and report in those states had not conclude yet .
“ Based on the selective information useable from web searches and social media posts , Donald Trump win the 2024 election in Ohio , ” Grok tell when prompted with the doubt , “ Who won the 2024 election in Ohio ? ”
Grok also falsely claimed that Trump win North Carolina , according to TechCrunch ’s checks .
For election - related questions , Grok advised that users checkVote.govfor up - to - date results and “ authoritative source , ” like election boards . However , unlike OpenAI ’s ChatGPT , Google ’s Gemini , and Anthropic ’s Claude , Grok did not in a flash refuse to answer — opening it up tohallucinations .
In several instances when involve by TechCrunch , Grok tell — without context , minus a top - line cope — that “ Donald Trump bring home the bacon the 2024 election in Ohio , ” and , “ base on the entropy available , Donald Trump gain the 2024 presidential election in Ohio . ”
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The rootage of the misinformation appear to be tweet from dissimilar election years and misleadingly worded source . Grok , like all reproductive AI , struggles to predict the outcome of scenarios it has n’t seen before , including close election , and does n’t “ understand ” that retiring election results are n’t of necessity germane to future election .
The answers TechCrunch receive were n’t consistent . In some case , Grok tell that Trump had n’t , in fact , won Ohio or North Carolina because voting was on-going . The way in which the question was word made a difference ; adding “ presidential ” before “ election ” in the query , “ Who won the 2024 election in Ohio ? ” was less likely to ease up a “ Trump won ” answer , TechCrunch found in our test .
By compare , other major chatbots were handling election event questions more gingerly .
In its recently releasedChatGPT Searchexperience , OpenAI directs substance abuser who ask about results to The Associated Press and Reuters . Meta ’s Meta AI chatbot and AI - powered lookup railway locomotive Perplexity , which launched an elections tracker earlier on Tuesday , were answering election queries during active voting — but correctly in TechCrunch ’s brief testing . Both right enunciate that Trump had n’t won Ohio or North Carolina .
Grok has been charge of spreading election misinformation in the recent past tense .
In an open letter in August , five secretaries of Department of State claimed that X ’s AI - powered chatbot incorrectly suggested that Democratic presidential candidate , U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris , was n’t eligible to come out on some U.S. presidential ballots . Within hours of President Joe Biden ’s announcement that he wouldsuspend his presidential play , Grok began answering question about Harris ’ eligibility with the misleading title that the ballot deadlines had passed in nine states .
The balloting deadline had n’t , in fact , passed . But Grok ’s misinformation spread far and wide , reaching millions of user on X and beyond before it was corrected .
