Elon Musk is hoping his ethically dubious generative AI tool, Grok, will help stem the continuing exodus from his social media site X. Musk has launched a free version of the AI chatbot Grok to X users without Premium accounts.
Digital market intelligence company Similarweb estimates that the number of daily active users on X has dropped from 32.3 million to 29.6 million, an 8.4% decrease, since early October in the U.S. The exodus coincides with Musk’s takeover of the @America handle on Oct. 6, in order to promote Donald Trump’s presidential run.
The social media company has become a cesspool of right-wing hate and misinformation since Musk acquired it in October 2022 for $44 billion. It has shed around 80% of its value since Musk took over, and has continued to bleed users ever since. Numerous news organizations and journalists fled the site in November, in anticipation of dubious changes to X’s terms of service.
At the same time, other social media spaces like Meta’s Threads and Bluesky have seen millions of new users flood their apps, and Musk is clearly feeling the deficit. Grok, which was launched in late November, and only available to premium subscribers at the time, was seen as a way for X to boost its piddling subscription sales. The free version allows users to ask Grok up to 10 questions every two hours and get several image analysis and generations per day. You can not use the chatbot without an X account.
But Grok has serious downsides. According to Wired, “Grok is prone to hallucinations and bias, with the AI assistant blamed for spreading misinformation about the 2024 election.” It also deeply integrates into X and implements tons of data collection, especially as X users are opted in to sharing one’s data whether using the service or not.
Musk not only needs to stop the bleeding of X users, he needs to inflate his number of Grok users to compete in the AI space with more established companies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s AI assistant which boast hundreds of millions more users. To that end, Musk has allowed users to create and promulgate fake images on X using Grok, a violation of the company’s own rules against misinformation.
Government spending on AI systems has increased greatly in recent years and Musk might also be feeling the need to create the appearance that his site and his generative AI are robust enough to be considered for government contracts. Contracts that he, as co-head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency agency, might have influence on.
But while Musk crows about Donald Trump’s plan to let billionaires carve up the United States and “receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental [sic] approvals,” he clearly has no plans to clean up the social media cesspool he’s created, and that’s the main problem.
“There’s a lot of content being amplified that most reasonable people would question whether is worth amplifying,” Bruce Daisley, a former vice president of then-Twitter outside the U.S. market, told The Guardian. “If I went out to a Christmas market, and if in the corner of this Christmas market there was a group of racist protesters, I probably wouldn’t stay there.”
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