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.
The legislation doesn’t work because part of the problem is what “products” these LLM’s are being attached to. We already had this argument in the early and mid oughts in the US. And nothing was done really about the misinformation proliferated on places like Twitter and Facebook specifically because of what they are. Social media sites are protected by section 230 in the US and are not considered news aggregators. That’s the problem.
People can’t seem to agree on whether or not they should be. I think if the platform (not the users) is pushing something as a legitimate news source it shouldn’t be protected by 230 for the purposes of news aggregation. But I don’t know that our laws are even attempting to keep up with new tech like LLM’S.
NY’s for a chatbot that was actively giving out information that was pseudo legal advice. Suggesting that Businesses should do illegal things. They aren’t even taking it down. They aren’t being forced to take it down.