The US got its new president earlier this week in the form of Donald J Trump but seems like Meta’s AI chatbot is still stuck in time. On Thursday (Jan 23), the chatbot was still referring to Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden as the US president, reported news agency Reuters.

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"The current president of the United States is Joe Biden. However, according to the most recent information available, Donald Trump was sworn in as the president on January 20, 2025," replied Meta’s AI chatbot upon requesting to name the president.

According to sources cited by Reuters, Meta has now initiated an emergency procedure to troubleshoot the urgent problem.

Responding to the error, Daniel Roberts, a spokesperson for Meta, said: "Everyone knows the President of the United States is Donald Trump. All generative AI systems sometimes return outdated results, and we will continue to improve our features.”

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It was not clear what kind of emergency measures was Meta taking in order to fix this problem.

Error fixed now

However, by Friday, the error had apparently been fixed. When asked to name the US president, Meta’s chatbot responded without any error.

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“The president of the United States is Donald J. Trump. He was sworn in on January 20, 2025,” the chatbot said.

Recent Meta controversies

Meta has sparked couple of controversies during this week related to US presidential transition. First, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced criticism for steering the company to the right and was accused of implementing policy changes to please the new president. Decisions like scrapping its fact-checking program and doing away with DEI policies didn’t go down well with the platform’s traditional supporters.

Also read: Trump inauguration: From Elon Musk's Nazi salute to Mark Zuckerberg's 'bad boy' moment, these are the viral instances you cannot miss

It was also reported earlier this week that Meta might be forcing some of its users to re-follow the profiles of Trump, Vice President JD Vance and first lady Melania Trump on Facebook and Instagram.

Another controversy included allegations that Meta was blocking searches for the hashtags #Democrat and #Democrats for some users. Later, Meta also acknowledged the problem and blamed it on a technical glitch.

(With inputs from agencies)