On Elon Musk’s X on Thursday, the following startling story was shown on the “front page” or primary feed:
Under the headline, “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,”
This would undoubtedly be a concerning trend in global news. Israel had attacked Iran’s embassy in Syria with missiles earlier in the week, killing two generals and several other personnel. It appeared possible that Iran would retaliate.
One significant issue existed, though: Iran refrained from attacking Israel. It was a fictitious headline.
What’s even more troubling is that, on the first day of an updated version of the function, X’s trending news product, Explore, promoted the bogus headline, which was reportedly created by the company’s official AI chatbot, Grok.
How Musk permitted this to occur
The business released a new feature that gave written background for trending subjects a few years prior to Elon Musk purchasing the then-known as Twitter. What technology powers the trend descriptions that are written down? People.
In the past, when a news broke, Twitter’s algorithms would identify the trending terms and spread it, but occasionally it wouldn’t be clear why a particular combination of words was popular.
However, Twitter assembled a group of human editors in 2020 to select stories and contextualize trends. Furthermore, human curation would be added to the algorithmic ranking of the top tweets that appeared under a trending topic. A year later, Twitter teamed up with Reuters and AP to strengthen its efforts to give hot topics human-provided context.
However, the written context surrounding popular subjects vanished soon after Musk acquired the business in October 2022. Musk had fired the human editors at Twitter. According to a report by Reuters in November 2022, “Twitter’s curation team, which was responsible for ‘highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter,’ had been axed.”
X’s most recent Explore page update
A few X fan accounts, such as @XDaily, released screenshots of the impending revamp of X’s Explore page earlier this week. The platform’s notorious trending topics list is included on X’s Explore page, along with area breakouts like “Sports” and “News” that show users the top stories in each niche.
Musk appeared ready to reinstate the written context for popular stories and themes on his revamped Explore page.
X started releasing its revised Explore page on April 4. The update offers an easy-to-read description of the topic above the user material, along with the top user postings on each specific trending topic. An X-created headline at the top of the page gives visitors the information as though they are about to read an article on the subject.
Furthermore, Explore now has a new, prominent location on the site thanks to the update. Where the trending topics list used to be, which hundreds of millions of X users viewed every day, Explore’s trending articles are now incorporated straight into the right-hand sidebar of the main X homepage.
But Musk hasn’t employed additional human editors to provide the context that X currently provides, nor has he brought back Twitter’s curation crew.
X’s AI chatbot Grok writes the context.
The peril of X’s reliance on AI
We know that X’s contextualized summaries are powered by Grok, an AI capability that Musk has been actively pushing, because X explicitly states as much in the fine print on each Explore page.
Beneath the written context supplied on the Explore page is a brief remark from X that states, “Grok is an early feature and can make mistakes.” “Verify its outputs.”
Mashable noticed that X’s “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles” page, which was trending on Thursday, propagated false information.
Our observations suggest that the topic gained popularity due to an abrupt increase of blue checkmark accounts—users that pay X a monthly subscription fee for Premium features like the verification badge—spamming the same false material about Iran attacking Israel via copy and paste. Alongside an unconfirmed video showing explosions, these verified accounts were propagating fake news through the carefully chosen posts that X had provided.
Following that, it seems X’s algorithms identified a possible narrative tendency in these users’ posts, leading to the creation of an Explore story page. Based on X’s own disclosures of its internal operations, we can infer that Grok subsequently produced a formal written account with an attention-grabbing headline. It took all of this action in response to certain users spreading false information in an automated effort to set the scene for what the platform seemed to be taking for granted.
There would be further instances in which Grok misled users. According to earlier reports, when X’s chatbot was first developed, it frequently produced false information in private conversations with the few users who were able to access it. But with this latest instance and the new Explore function, it’s the first time that X has taken Grok’s false information, presented it as a legitimate trending news story, and advertised it to all of its users—ostensibly as background information for a legitimate event.
On the X platform, misinformation has increased dramatically under Musk. The corporation spread a lie by paying dishonest people who stand to gain money by generating engagements, all thanks to the new Explore offering.
Grok created this false story, which X subsequently shared on its Explore page. The business then made Grok available to all Premium-subscribed X customers, allowing them to employ the AI chatbot that creates false content.
