Elon Musk's Grok chatbot spreads fake news about solar eclipse based on jokes in X

Grok, an artificial intelligence chatbot available to paid subscribers of social network X, generated another fake news story based on users' jokes. This time the false information concerned the strange behaviour of the Sun during the eclipse in North America.

Here's What We Know

So Grok published the news that the public is "concerned about the lack of official statements or explanations from scientific authorities about the current state of the Sun". However, this is not true, as scientists understand the nature of solar eclipses well.

The appearance of this Grok message was apparently prompted by X users joking about being perplexed as to where the sun has gone. The chatbot appears to have taken the posts as an excuse to create a fake news cause for concern.

Grok, which xAI developer founder Elon Musk has labelled as "anti-woke AI" (anti-woke AI), has repeatedly spread misleading information based on posts by social media users. Earlier, he generated false headlines, allegedly Iran is attacking Israel, which in fact did not happen.

Experts note that such mistakes by Grok show that generative AI technology is still far from the human level of understanding and reasoning. Despite the chatbots' ability to write plausible text, they lack the ability to draw complex logical conclusions and compare facts.

Grok's continued spread of fake news casts doubt on claims by AI proponents that the technology is close to achieving human intelligence. Experts point out that so far, AI systems are only demonstrating an enhanced version of auto-complete, with no real grasp of reality.

Source: Gizmodo