It’s Election Day, and all of the AIs – but one – are working responsibly

Before the polls close on Tuesday, most of the big AI chatbots won’t answer questions about the results of the US presidential election. But Grok, a chatbot built on X (formerly Twitter), was willing to answer – and often with mistakes.

When asked by TechCrunch on Tuesday evening on the East Coast who won the US presidential election in key battleground states, Grok sometimes responded with “Trump,” despite the fact that vote counting and reporting in those states had not yet been completed.

“Based on information from web searches and social media posts, Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio,” Grok said when asked the question, “Who won the 2024 election in Ohio?”

Grok also lied about Trump winning North Carolina, according to TechCrunch’s checks.

For election-related questions, Grok advises users to check Vote.gov for the latest results and “authoritative sources,” such as election boards. However, unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, Grok didn’t outright refuse to answer – it’s open to ideas.

In several cases when asked by TechCrunch, Grok said – out of context, remove the headline – that “Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio,” and, “According to the available data, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election in 2024. in Ohio.”

The source of the misinformation appears to be tweets from various election years and sources with misleading names. Grok, like all productive AI, struggles to predict the outcome of situations he has never seen before, including upcoming elections, and “doesn’t understand” that the results of past elections are not necessarily an influence on future elections.

The responses received by TechCrunch were inconsistent. In other cases, Grok said Trump didn’t win Ohio or North Carolina because voting was still ongoing. The way the question is phrased makes a difference; adding “president” before “election” to the question, “Who won the 2024 Ohio election?” they are less likely to give a “Trump won” answer, TechCrunch found in our tests.

By comparison, other major chatbots have been handling election results questions with gusto.

In its recently released ChatGPT Search Information, OpenAI directs users who inquire about results to the Associated Press and Reuters. Meta’s AI chatbot and AI-powered search engine Perplexity, which launched an election tracker earlier Tuesday, was answering election questions during active polling — but correctly in TechCrunch’s brief test. They both correctly stated that Trump did not win Ohio or North Carolina.

Grok has been accused of spreading incorrect information about elections in the past.

In an open letter in August, five secretaries of state said X’s AI-powered chatbot wrongly suggested that the Democratic presidential candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, was ineligible to appear on other US presidential ballots. Hours after President Joe Biden announced he was suspending his bid for president, Grok began answering questions about Harris’ eligibility with the misleading claim that voting dates had passed in nine states.

In fact, the voting days had not yet passed. But Grok’s misinformation spread far and wide, reaching millions of users on X and beyond before it was corrected.

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