Real or fake? Study finds that X’s Grok has trouble sorting fact from fiction amid misinformation

Elon Musk's Grok chatbot is built into the X social media platform. Photo / Getty Images

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok produced inaccurate and contradictory responses when users sought to fact-check the Israel-Iran conflict, a study said today, raising fresh doubts about its reliability as a debunking tool.

With tech platforms reducing their reliance on human fact-checkers, users are increasingly using AI-powered chatbots - including xAI’s Grok - in search of reliable information.

But their responses are often themselves prone to misinformation.

“The investigation into Grok’s performance during the first days of the Israel-Iran conflict exposes significant flaws and limitations in the AI chatbot’s ability to provide accurate, reliable, and consistent information during times of crisis,” said the study from the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, an American think-tank.

“Grok demonstrated that it struggles with verifying already-confirmed facts, analysing fake visuals, and avoiding unsubstantiated claims.”

The DFRLab analysed around 130,000 posts in various languages on the platform X, where the AI assistant is built in, to find that Grok was “struggling to authenticate AI-generated media”.

Following Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel, Grok offered vastly different responses to similar prompts about an AI-generated video of a destroyed airport that amassed millions of views on X, the study found.

It oscillated - sometimes within the same minute - between denying the airport’s destruction and confirming it had been damaged by strikes, the study said.

In some responses, Grok cited a missile launched by Yemeni rebels as the source of the damage. In others, it wrongly identified the AI-generated airport as one in Beirut, Gaza, or Tehran.

When users shared another AI-generated video depicting buildings collapsing after an alleged Iranian strike on Tel Aviv, Grok responded that it appeared to be real, the study said.

The Israel-Iran conflict, which led to United States air strikes against Tehran’s nuclear programme over the weekend, has churned out an avalanche of online misinformation including AI-generated videos and war visuals recycled from other conflicts.

AI chatbots also amplified falsehoods.

As the Israel-Iran war intensified, false claims spread across social media that China had dispatched military cargo planes to Tehran to offer its support.

When users asked the AI-operated X accounts of AI companies Perplexity and Grok about its validity, both wrongly responded that the claims were true, according to disinformation watchdog NewsGuard.

Researchers say Grok has previously made errors verifying information related to crises such as the recent India-Pakistan conflict and anti-immigration protests in Los Angeles.

Last month, Grok was under renewed scrutiny for inserting “white genocide” in South Africa, a far-right conspiracy theory, into unrelated queries.

Musk’s start-up xAI blamed an “unauthorised modification” for the unsolicited response.

Musk, a South African-born billionaire, has previously peddled the unfounded claim that South Africa’s leaders were “openly pushing for genocide” of white people.

Musk himself blasted Grok after it cited Media Matters - a liberal media watchdog he has targeted in multiple lawsuits - as a source in some of its responses about misinformation.

“Shame on you, Grok,” Musk wrote on X. “Your sourcing is terrible.”

-Agence France-Presse