Yesterday, shocking news appeared on the X home page for many: according to the tweet, Iran attacked Israel and fired missiles at Tel Aviv. Naturally, nothing like this happened, but it's not hard to believe it could happen, and that's probably why many people liked this news. Even more disturbing is that the fake headline was apparently created by X's official chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X's popular news feed feature, Explore, on the first day of its updated version. Mashable writes.
In 2020, Twitter assembled a team tasked with recommending news alongside its algorithm and putting hot trends in context. A year later, Twitter partnered with AP and Reuters to further enhance the feature.
Shortly after Musk bought the company in October 2022, written context on trending topics disappeared and Musk fired Twitter editors. This week it turned out that X will also have a “discover” function, that is, an explore page, where the latest and most popular topics will be played. On April 4, the new version was launched.
The update presents the most popular user posts for each trending topic, as well as an easy-to-view summary of the topic above the user content. At the top of the page, there is a headline created by X that provides readers with information as if they were reading an article about that topic.
However, Musk did not bring back the old team for this, nor did he hire anyone, as the content was generated by X's AI chatbot, Grok. According to Mashable, the current hoax may have gained a lot of publicity because verified accounts began distributing the same tweet widely, and even attached an unverified video to it. Consequently, Grok was able to apparently create the official narrative for the story, and the Explore page treated it as if it were real news. So the chatbot produced a deceptive story from a viral hoax.
By the way, this isn't the first time Grok has been caught spreading fake news: there have been reports of him spreading false information during private conversations.
