October 20, 2025 01:52 PM UTC

Elon Musk's AI Feeds False No Kings Day Denial

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• by: Colorado Pols

Saturday’s No Kings Day protest in Denver and cities across the state and nation brought out millions of people to, with only limited exceptions, peacefully and responsibly demonstrate their displeasure with the direction of the country under Maximum President Donald Trump. Early estimates of seven million nationwide would make these the biggest protests since the January, 2017 Women’s March that inaugurated the first Trump presidency on a similarly defiant note–and presaged a calamitous midterm election for Republicans in 2018.

Crowds for yesterday’s protests were big enough that prominent conservatives on social media had trouble believing their lying eyes, a circumstance for which they came prepared with a wagonload of denial:

For reasons that have not as yet been explained, the artificial intelligence on Twitter/X known as Grok initially validated the claim that MSNBC was broadcasting years-old footage and claiming it to be live from No Kings Day in Boston:

But as Sue O’Connell reports for NBC10 Boston, this was just another case of the lie spreading around the world while the truth was still getting its proverbial pants on:

Within hours, social media exploded with claims that MSNBC had aired “recycled footage” from 2017. The accusation spread like wildfire—15,000 likes here, thousands of shares there. People who weren’t even in Boston were suddenly experts on what did or didn’t happen on our Common. People who know little to nothing about foliage were commenting on the green of our October trees.

Grok, the AI tool built by xAI, made a mistake. Asked to verify the footage, it misidentified Saturday’s protest as being from 2017, citing “superficial similarities.” The bot later corrected itself, but the damage was done. The false claim had already gone viral.

BBC Verify stepped in and confirmed what those of us who were actually here already knew: the footage was authentic. They matched it to drone shots, local news reports from us and other local news outlets.

They even ran reverse image searches.

The verdict: Saturday’s protest was real. The video was indeed from Saturday.

But truth is slow and lies are fast… [Pols emphasis]

A similar case of denial took place on a somewhat smaller scale locally, after 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark posted a drone photo from Saturday’s event at the Colorado State Capitol:

But all it took was a moment of Googling to find a second photo by the same New York Times photographer from a slightly different angle that confirms the accuracy of the first:

With truth judged of incidental importance compared to traffic, the omniscient algorithms that dictate what individuals are exposed to on social media are incentivized to confirm what that reader wants to believe more than to promote objectively factual information. If someone wants to believe photos of No Kings Day are faked, that’s what they’ll see validated in their feeds. If readers want to know what is true, they can still find it, but it’s not prioritized over falsehoods even days after they are debunked.

All the truth can do in response is take more pictures from more camera angles, and hope to catch up before the next election.