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Elon Musk’s Grok spewed election disinformation for a week
The result of this year’s hotly contested presidential election will likely be decided by a narrow slice of independent and undecided voters in a handful of swing states. It’s against this backdrop that X’s AI chatbot, Grok, spewed a heavy dose of election misinformation about Joe Biden’s decision not to run.
Just after President Biden made his announcement not to seek reelection on July 21, 2024, Grok began stating that it was already too late to switch out Biden’s name for Harris’s on the top of the ticket in nine states. The chatbot continued to propagate this false claim until July 31st. While only Premium users can use Grok, and Grok includes a disclaimer saying it might get things wrong, MAGA types promptly amplified the claim across X and other social platforms, giving fodder to conspiracy theories.
As a result, five secretaries of state sent a letter to Elon Musk this week demanding that he “immediately implement changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.” Rather than feeding information to users, the letter says, Grok should direct users to the neutral voter information site CanIVote.org (as OpenAI’s ChatGPT does).
Musk hyped Grok as an “anti-woke” chatbot that wouldn’t shy away from spicy questions. After he bought Twitter in 2022, the tech magnate said the platform “needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world.” Most would agree that both the site and the owner have so far fallen well short of that goal. Musk himself has continually spread misinformation on the platform, and just last week shared an AI deepfake video that put words to a Harris video that she didn’t really say.
This latest incident raises an even more frightening question: Where did the chatbot get the false information about the ballot deadlines in the first place? Could Grok have learned it from training data scraped from the posts of X users? If the chatbot is getting most of its knowledge from things said on the social network, we can expect Grok to continue sounding like the neighborhood Karen, spouting misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories du jour.
Did Wall Street just lose its religion on AI?
The so-called Magnificent Seven stocks are having a rough go. The companies in this group, which include Apple, Tesla, Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, have pushed the market to multiple all-time highs this year, but they lost a combined $1.3 trillion of market capitalization from July 31 through August 5. The companies together saw $650 billion in market cap wiped out on Monday alone. The stocks, along with the rest of the market, have since stabilized somewhat but are still a ways off from a full recovery.
The sell-off was likely caused by factors unrelated to the companies and their products. The Fed hasn’t lowered interest rates, and unemployment is rising, to name a couple. But Magnificent Seven companies are some of the most active in developing and productizing new AI technology. This has caused speculation that the sell-off was partly caused by a growing belief among investors that the value creation of new AI has been overplayed, causing an “AI bubble.”
The Magnificent Seven are investing heavily in AI research and development, but for most, that investment isn’t yet driving up quarterly revenues. The obvious exception is Nvidia, which has seen its stock explode after practically cornering the market for the GPUs needed to train the largest AI models. But even Nvidia stock took a 6% hit on Monday.
The markets should get used to these resets and surges. The AI story is just beginning. Consumers are just starting to use AI tools like chatbots. And while enterprises are building generative AI into their systems, most are not yet seeing real cost savings from their efforts. Investors aren’t tempering their overall expectations for AI, but they may be taking a breath and lengthening their timelines for an eventual payoff.
AI companies object to California AI bill’s ‘pre-harm’ sanctions
A bill that would regulate the development and use of AI has for months been moving in the California state house, and has become the subject of more debate as it gets closer to passage. Senate Bill 1047 would require companies to conduct safety testing for advanced AI systems and shoulder liability for any catastrophic harm they cause. Many across the AI community have said that the bill overreaches, and would stifle new investment in AI as well as slow down the race toward Artificial General Intelligence.
Anthropic and others oppose the bill because it lets the state sue AI companies for not having a compliant and transparent safety framework in place. Opponents believe the bill should incentivize AI companies to have effective safety practices in place by using a threat of enforcement action, including penalties, if and when the AI actually causes some kind of harm (such as devising a cyberattack or helping to create a bioweapon.)
Another sticking point is the bill’s creation of a “Frontier Model Division,” which would develop a set of standards that the AI companies’ safety practices would have to follow. Industry stakeholders fear that a government agency with no experience regulating nascent, quickly moving AI space may end up creating onerous standards that slow down innovation.
Public interest groups such as the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute argue that the bill should move forward in its current form. The group’s own polling data shows 65% of Californians support SB 1047 as currently written, while only 25% oppose the legislation.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
- Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again
- Intel passed on its chance to own OpenAI years ago. Now, it has fallen behind
- CIOs have never been more important to a company’s success
- How AI chatbots could actually improve civic engagement in the 2024 election
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