X makes Grok AI chatbot available to Premium subscribers, but it still cannot be used by nonpaying users

Elon Musk's X is set to make xAI's Grok chatbot available to Premium-tier subscribers after he announced last month that the tool would be made available to more paid users.

The social media platform's help center indicates that Grok will still not be available to nonpaying users. Only Premium and Premium+ users in certain regions will be able to use the AI tool. Tech Crunch reported that paying users will be able to use Grok in two modes: "Regular mode" or "Fun mode."

As with other Large Language Model products, Grok comes with a label that suggests it could return inaccurate answers. This seems to suggest that the AI tool has not yet been perfected, and users should be aware of the shortcomings of such a technology.

One way in which AI chatbots have been utilized is by summarizing trending stories around the world. Grok, Jeff Bezos, and NVIDIA-endorsed Perplexity AI are all trying to break into this space.

However, it appears Musk's Grok has been inaccurate in major headlines, potentially misleading users of the chatbot.

Last week, Grok generated a fake headline, which said: "Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles." While the content of the headline did not seem to be out of the realm of possibility, given the situation in the Middle East, Iran did not strike Israel with heavy missiles.

Mashable reported: "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."

Mashable noted that one reason Musk's platform allowed this to happen is the lack of "human editors." In 2020, X (formerly known as Twitter) put together a human editors team that put trends and news in context. However, Musk appeared to do away with the "human editors" concept after he took over the company in 2022.

Musk wrote the following shortly after taking over the social media platform: "Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America."

X announced in late 2023 that Grok was going to be made available. The post even suggested that users should be aware that the chatbot could render inaccurate answers to prompts: "Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!"

"Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor! A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems. Grok is still a very early beta product — the best we could do with 2 months of training — so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help."

While Musk has certainly suggested that he wants to peel back censorship on his platform — setting X apart from platforms such as Facebook and Instagram — it appears something needs to be done to prevent Grok from generating fake headlines and other potentially misleading information.

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