Elon Musk’s Grok bot restricts sexual image generation after outcry
Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot on Thursday began restricting the ability of non-paying users to create deepfake, sexualized images following a global backlash from users and governments.
Late last month, some users began tagging Grok on Musk’s social media platform X with prompts such as “put her in a bikini” to create non-consensual images of real people on X.
The altered images, including images of celebrities, politicians, and some minors, were created by Grok and published publicly on X.
Before the current restrictions came into effect, Musk joined the AI undressing trend by instructing Grok to generate photos of himself in a bikini.
Users and authorities complained and threatened to sue or punish X. Grok initially apologized for the inappropriate photos of what appeared to be children.
Now X has put Grok’s controversial crossover capabilities behind a paywall.
Governments, including the United Kingdom and the European Commission, have said they are unhappy with the security measures X provides, as the ability to create and edit images is still not available. available to paying users.
“Restricting AI rendering to paid users may marginally reduce volume and increase traceability but abuse has not been stopped. It has simply been placed behind a paywall and allowed X to profit from the damage,” Emma Pickering, head of technology-facilitated abuse and economic empowerment at Refuge, said in a statement.
As public outrage grows over what many call AI-enabled harassment, regulators have taken notice and made some proposals to ban X in their countries.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said X “must catch” this “disgusting” trend. “We will take action on this because this is absolutely unacceptable,” Starmer said.
Musk appeared to criticize UK regulators in veiled pushback anger By reposting the claim that ChatGPT also allows the creation of a bikini image of a non-real person through creative, non-obvious manipulations.
After condemning Grok for producing sexualized images, the European Commission ordered X to retain all documents related to Grok to ensure compliance with its rules.
“We clearly need to be able to access them if we request it,” a commission spokesman said. press conference.
France, India, Malaysia and Brazil are also examining the platform.
While public figures were the initial targets of AI stripping, it soon turned over to private individuals as well. On Jan. 3, a user directed Grok to create nonconsensual, sexualized images of women in workplace environments 50 times a day, according to an analysis by AI detection company Copyleaks.
Gender justice group Ultraviolet organized a campaign Pressuring Apple and Google to remove X from their respective app stores on the grounds that X violates child sexual abuse guidelines.
Musk has positioned his chatbot as a sharper alternative to more feature-packed alternatives like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. restrictive rules around open content requests.
