HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Grok AI on X Created and Promoted False Iran Missile Strike News

April 4, 2024

On April 4, 2024, X's AI chatbot Grok generated a false headline claiming "Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles," which was then promoted on X's trending news section. This misinformation, fueled by user spamming of fake news, falsely indicated a serious international conflict. The incident highlighted significant risks associated with relying on AI for content curation and demonstrated the potential for widespread dissemination of harmful misinformation.
Alleged deployer
x-(twitter)
Alleged developer
x-(twitter)
Alleged harmed parties
x-(twitter)-users, israelis, iranians, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/719

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.