Germany plans measures to combat harmful AI image manipulation

BERLIN, Jan 9 (Reuters) – Germany’s justice ministry plans to introduce measures in the near future that will allow authorities to combat smoking more effectively. artificial intelligence It was intended to manipulate the images in a way that violated personal rights, a spokesman said Friday.

Grok, the resident AI chatbot on billionaire Elon Musk’s social media site X, is under investigation in Europe for a so-called “spicy mode” that allows users to create sexually explicit images.

An investigation by Reuters found that the chatbot’s rendering feature was used to create images of minimally clad women and children, often without the consent of the people depicted.

Germany’s media minister earlier this week called on the European Commission to take legal action to stop what he called the “industrialization of sexual harassment” in X.

Answering a question about the dispute at a regular government press conference, Justice Ministry spokeswoman Anna-Lena Beckfeld said Germany was preparing to handle the issue in its domestic courts.

“The use of large-scale manipulation for systematic violation of personal rights is unacceptable,” he said. “That’s why we want to ensure that criminal law is used more effectively to combat this.”

He told reporters that the ministry was working to better regulate deepfakes and was planning a law against digital violence to support their victims.

“We want to make it easier for them to take direct action against rights violations on the Internet,” Beckfeld said.

Stating that the Ministry plans to present concrete proposals in the near future, the Minister added that he cannot comment in detail on the plans at this stage.

Initially ignoring Grok’s concerns about image building, xAI has now limited this functionality to paid subscribers. Musk said last week that anyone using the chatbot to create illegal content would face the same consequences as uploading such material directly.

(Reporting by Andreas Rinke ‌and Miranda Murray; Editing by Joe Bavier)