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.
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 problem: 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.
Corporations are completely authoritarian, while most governments are not, or at least not completely. If there really is a “rogue engineer”, Musk can very easily fire them. Even if there was, it’s his responsibility to organize a company in such a way that this cannot happen, with people having oversight over other people.
He is very clearly failing to do any of that.