A shocking story was published on the “front page” or main feed of Elon Musk’s X on Thursday:
“Iran strikes Tel Aviv with heavy missiles,” read the headline.
Trending captured on April 4, 2024 on X.
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
This will certainly be an alarming global news development. Earlier this week, Israel… Conducted An airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Syria killed two generals as well as other officers. A retaliation by Iran seemed a plausible scenario.
I’ve been forced blue checked on Elon Musk’s X. how is it
But, there was one big problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.
What’s more, the fake headline was apparently generated by X’s own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then published by X’s trending news product, Explore, on the first day of the feature’s updated version. was advertised.
The tweet may have been deleted.
How did Musk let this happen?
A few years before Elon Musk acquired the platform known as Twitter, the company introduced a new feature that Written context For trending topics. Technology powering the description of the writing trend? Humans.
Previously, when a story broke, Twitter’s algorithms would catch the relevant keywords being posted and share trending, but sometimes it wasn’t clear why a given set of words was trending.
But, in 2020, Twitter assembled a team. Human editors Correcting news and putting trends into context. Additionally, the top tweets that appear under a trending topic will no longer be ranked solely by algorithms, but also include human curation. A year later, Twitter partner with AP and Reuters to further strengthen its efforts to provide human-supplied context to trending topics.
Shortly after Musk bought the company in October 2022, though, the written context on the trending topics disappeared. Musk fired Twitter’s human editors. As Reuters reported in November 2022, “Twitter’s curation team, which was responsible for ‘highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories emerging on Twitter,’ was axed.” “
X’s newly updated Explore page
Earlier this week, some X fan accounts like @XDaily shared Screenshots X’s upcoming Explore page Restarting. X’s Explore page includes specific section breakouts such as “News” and “Sports” along with a list of the platform’s notoriously trending topics to provide users with trending stories within each specific topic category.
The tweet may have been deleted.
Musk’s updated Explore page appeared poised to bring back written context to trending topics and stories.
On April 4, X began rolling out its newly updated Explore page. The update provides top user posts on each individual trending topic, as well as an easy-to-digest topic summary above user content. At the very top of the page, a headline created by an X presents information to the reader as if they were about to read an article on the subject.
In addition, the update also gives Explorer a new, prominent place on the platform. Explore’s trending stories now appear directly embedded in the right-hand sidebar of the main X homepage, where the list of trending topics used to be located, viewed daily by millions of daily X users.
In a screenshot captured from popular Twitch user Hassan Piker’s stream, a fake AI-generated X headline can be seen trending on the platform’s homepage sidebar.
Credit: Hasan Packers Twitch
However, Musk hasn’t brought back Twitter’s curation team, nor has he hired new human editors to write the context X now provides.
Written by Grok, Context X’s AI chatbot.
Risk of X depending on AI
We know that Grok, an AI feature is huge. Promoted by the Muskpowers X’s context summary as X says itself in the fine print on every page of Explorer.
The tweet may have been deleted.
“Grok is an early feature and can make mistakes,” reads X’s small note below the text context provided on the Explore page. “Verify its outputs.”
Mashable saw X’s “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles” page that spread fake news as it was trending on Thursday..
Based on our observations, it appears that this topic is trending due to the sudden increase in blue checkmark accounts (users who pay a monthly subscription to X for premium features including a verification badge).Attacks on Iran The same copy and paste is spreading misinformation about Isra Yale. The curated posts provided by X were filled with verified accounts depicting the explosions along with an unverified video spreading the fake news.
A side-by-side comparison of two separate posts on the XExplorer page showing fake news posts from BlueCheck users who notified Grok.
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
From there, it appears that X’s algorithm looks for potential story trends in those users’ posts, and discovers a story page. We can infer from X’s own claims about its inner workings that Grok would then have created an official-looking written narrative with a catchy headline. It did all of this based on selected users sharing fake news, in an attempt to automatically provide context to what the platform itself was assuming was a real story.
This wouldn’t be the first time Grok has misled users. Previous reporting about an early version of X’s chatbot found that it often created fake news in private chats with a select few users who had access to it. However, this recent incident, combined with the new Explore feature, marks the first time X has taken Grok’s misinformation, packaged it as an actual trending news story, and promoted it to its entire user base, apparently. As a context for a real event.
Under Musk, there is disinformation The sky was touched On a platform known as X. Thanks to the new Explore product, the company promoted a lie, spread by paying bad actors who stand to make money instead of generating engagement.
one day After Grok created the fake story, which X then promoted through its Explore page, the company rolled out Grok to all premium-subscribed X users to stop the disinformation-generating AI chatbot. can also use
The tweet may have been deleted.