India, Malaysia, France hit out at X over 'offensive' Grok images

By Anisah Shukry

 

Elon Musk’s Grok is facing mounting criticism and threats of government action around the world after the artificial intelligence chatbot created sexualised images, including of minors, on the social media platform X in response to user prompts.

 

Malaysian authorities said in a statement Saturday that they are investigating images produced by Grok after complaints about the misuse of AI to manipulate images of women and minors to produce indecent, grossly offensive, or otherwise harmful content.

 

Creating or transmitting such harmful content is an offense under Malaysian law, the Communications and Multimedia Commission said in a statement Saturday. The media watchdog will investigate X users alleged to have violated the law and will summon representatives from the company, it said. 

 

 

“While X is not presently a licensed service provider, it has the duty to prevent dissemination of harmful content on its platform,” according to the commission’s statement.  

 

Malaysia is the latest government to express growing concern over Grok. India on Friday wrote to X, ordering a comprehensive review of the AI chatbot to ensure it doesn’t generate content containing “nudity, sexualisation, sexually explicit or otherwise unlawful content.” Bloomberg has seen a copy of the letter dated Jan. 2. 

 

The platform has to submit a report of action taken to India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology within 72 hours and was warned of possible legal action under criminal and IT laws. The government said it may consider regulations on social media platforms for inappropriate AI-generated content.

 

“The Parliamentary Committee has recommended a strong law for regulating social media,” India’s Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in an interview with CNBC-TV 18. “We are considering it.” 

 

France on Friday accused Grok of generating “clearly illegal” sexual content on X without people’s consent. The French government said in a statement that the Grok-created images potentially violate the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The regulation requires large platforms to mitigate the risk of illegal content spreading, according to the statement. 

 

The chatbot’s offending images are an apparent violation of its own acceptable-use policy, which prohibits the sexualization of children. Some of the pictures images have been taken down. 

 

An emailed request for comment to xAI, the company that develops Grok and runs X, yielded the reply “Legacy Media Lies.”

 

Over the past two weeks, an increasing number of users on the platform have requested Grok to create images and to morph photographs of women and children in a sexual context. The trend caught on globally after the platform introduced the edit-image feature ahead of Christmas.  

 

Grok generated a post on X in response to users’ questions on Friday that it had identified “lapses in safeguards” that were being urgently fixed.