A shocking story was promoted on the “front page” or main feed of Elon Musk’s X on Thursday:
“Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,” read the headline.
Captured trending on X on April 4, 2024.
Credit: Mashable screenshot
This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.
But, there was one major sorun: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.
Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X’s own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X’s trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.
https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1775662236649861462″ target=”_blank” title=”(opens in a new window)” rel=”noopener
Musk’s updated Explore page looked poised to bring back the written context provided to trending topics and stories.
On April 4, X began rolling out its newly updated Explore page. The update provides top user posts on each individual trending topic as well as an easy-to-digest summary of the subject matter above the user content. At the very top of the page, an X-created headline presents the information to readers much as if they were about to read an article on the topic.
In addition, the update also gives Explore a new, prominent location on the platform. Explore’s trending stories now appear embedded directly in the right-hand sidebar of the main X homepage, where the trending topics list used to be located, which hundreds of millions of X’s daily users view everyday.
In a screenshot captured from popular Twitch user Hasan Piker’s stream, the fake AI-generated X headline can be seen trending on the platform’s homepage sidebar.
Credit: Hasan Piker’s Twitch
However, Musk özgü not brought back Twitter’s curation team, nor özgü he hired new human editors to write the context X now provides.
The context is written by X’s AI chatbot, Grok.
The danger of X depending on AI
We know that Grok, an AI feature heavily promoted by Musk, powers X’s contextualized summaries because X says so itself in the fine print on every Explore page.
https://twitter.com/lindayaX/status/1776268775068721459″ target=”_blank” title=”(opens in a new window)” rel=”noopener