Govt considering legal action against Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok

Grok like any other content-generating account on X, faces risk of being barred

The government is considering legal action against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot Grok for failing to comply with laws governing the generation of objectionable images involving women and children, a senior government official said. 

“We are taking legal opinion on how we should proceed with this. Our opinion is that, like many other accounts on X, the Grok account generates content. Now, since Grok’s account is generating content that falls afoul of the law of the land, it should be treated like any other account on the platform and be taken down,” the official said. 

Though Grok has now limited the image-generation feature to paying and premium users only, officials in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) said that unless X states this as a “stated official policy in India as well”, legal action against it is likely to continue. 

In its response to queries sent by Business Standard, X said that it takes action “against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.” 

“Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” a spokesperson for the social media intermediary said. 

The action against Grok and X is likely even as the ministry is studying the action-taken report submitted by the platform in response to its notice. 

On Wednesday, X submitted its response to Meity’s notice, which had sought to know how Grok allowed users to generate objectionable and sexually explicit images of women and children with simple prompts. 

Senior government officials had then said that X’s response was not satisfactory and lacked details of the actions it had taken against users who were able to use Grok’s image-generation capabilities to generate objectionable content. 

Last week, in a letter to X, the ministry’s cyber law division had asked the platform to “remove or disable access, without delay, to all content already generated or disseminated in violation of applicable laws, in strict compliance with the timelines prescribed under the Information Technology Rules, 2021, without vitiating the evidence in any manner”.

 

In its letter, Meity had also said that X must enforce its terms of service and AI usage restrictions, and take “strong deterrent measures”, including suspending, terminating, or taking other action against accounts using Grok to create sexually explicit images of women and children. 

A day after Meity’s letter, Musk warned in a post on X that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content”.