Musk’s AI chatbot Grok faces global backlash
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is facing a backlash from governments around the world after a recent surge in sexualized images of women and children generated without consent by the artificial intelligence-powered tool.
On Tuesday, Britain’s top technology official demanded that Musk’s social media platform X take urgent action, while a Polish lawmaker cited it as a reason to enact digital safety laws.
The European Union’s executive arm has denounced Grok while officials and regulators in France, India, Malaysia, and Brazil have condemned the platform and called for investigations.
Nightmarish potential
Rising alarm from disparate nations points to the nightmarish potential of nudification apps that use artificial intelligence to generate sexually explicit deepfake images.
The problem emerged after the launch last year of Grok Imagine, an AI image generator that allows users to create videos and pictures by typing in text prompts. It includes a so-called “spicy mode” that can generate adult content.
‘Absolutely appalling’
It snowballed late last month when Grok, which is hosted on X, apparently began granting a large number of user requests to modify images posted by others. As of Tuesday, Grok users could still generate images of women using requests such as, “put her in a transparent bikini.”
The problem is amplified both because Musk pitches his chatbot as an edgier alternative to rivals with more safeguards, and because Grok’s images are publicly visible, and can therefore be easily spread.
Nonprofit group AI Forensics said in a report that it analyzed 20,000 images generated by Grok between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1, and found that 2 percent depicted a person who appeared to be 18 or younger, including 30 of young or very young women or girls, in bikinis or transparent clothes.
X must “urgently” deal with the problem, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said Tuesday, adding that she supported additional scrutiny from the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom.
Kendall said the content is “absolutely appalling, and unacceptable in decent society.”
A Polish lawmaker used Grok on Tuesday as a reason for national digital safety legislation that would beef up protections for minors and make it easier for authorities to remove content.
The bloc’s executive arm is “well aware” that Grok is being used to for “explicit sexual content with some output generated with child-like images,” European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said.
“This is not spicy. This is illegal. This is appalling. This is disgusting. This is how we see it, and this has no place in Europe. This is not the first time that Grok is generating such output,” he told reporters Monday. After Grok spread Holocaust-denial content last year, according to Regnier, the Commission sought more information from Musk’s social media platform X. The response from X is currently being analyzed, he said.
Ultimatum
The Indian government on Friday issued an ultimatum to X, demanding that it take down all “unlawful content” and take action against offending users. The country’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology also ordered the company to review Grok’s “technical and governance framework” and file a report on actions taken.
The Malaysian communications watchdog said Saturday it was investigating X users who violated laws prohibiting spreading “grossly offensive, obscene, or indecent content.”
Disable functions
Brazilian lawmaker Erika Hilton said she reported Grok and X to the country’s federal public prosecutor’s office and data protection watchdog.
She said X’s AI functions should be disabled until an investigation has been carried out.
Hilton, one of Brazil’s first transgender lawmakers, decried how users could get Grok to digitally alter any published photo, including “swapping the clothes of women and girls for bikinis or making them suggestive and erotic.”
