Govt to check Grok's responses for possible violations of India laws

The government will check for possible violations of the provisions of Indian law concerning the responses of social media platform X’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool Grok and take action only if necessary, a senior government official said.

 

The ministry of electronics and information technology has, in the meanwhile, reached out to X’s (formerly Twitter) representatives in India and sought their response on replies generated by Grok in response to questions posed by Indian users, the official said.

 

The IT ministry has, however, sent no notices to X or any other internet intermediary to date regarding the responses generated by their AI tools, the official said, adding that X will be reminded of the obligations of social media intermediaries regarding content posted on them and the liabilities under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act of 2000.

 

“We have, of course, reached out to them to understand what is happening, the datasets on which the chatbot has been trained, and any possible violations there. At this stage, however, we are not inclined to send them (X) a notice,” the official said.

 

X’s AI tool Grok’s version 3 has, over the last few days, generated controversial responses to questions asked by Indian users. These responses have at times contained profanities in Hindi as well as urban colloquial language.

 

In comparison, the responses generated by other chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have, over time, sanitised themselves and often refuse to respond to controversial questions.