Musk response: “Legacy Media Lies” 

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.

Rising alarm from disparate nations points to the nightmarish potential of nudification apps that use artificial intelligence to generate sexually explicit deepfake images.

Image generation
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.

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% 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.

Musk response
Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, responded to a request for comment with the automated response, “Legacy Media Lies”.

However, X did not deny that the troublesome content generated through Grok exists. Yet it still claimed in a post on its Safety account, that it takes action against illegal content, including child sexual abuse material, “by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.”

The platform also repeated a comment from Musk, who said, “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

A growing list of countries are demanding that Musk does more to rein in explicit or abusive content.

AP News report