Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX, X and xIA
Elon Musk’s platform
Platform X, formerly Twitter, finally announced, this Wednesday, measures to prevent Grok from creating deepfakes with videos from images of real people.
The announcement comes after California’s attorney general, Rob Bontahaving initiated an investigation into xAI, the Artificial Intelligence company of Elon Muskfor “facilitating the large-scale production of non-consensual intimate assemblages, used to harass women and girls on the internet, mainly through the social network X”, according to a statement.
“We have zero tolerance for the creation and dissemination, with AI, of non-consensual intimate images or material pedopornographic“, added the attorney general of the North American state in a published this Wednesday. The investigation will determine “whether and how xAI violated the law“.
The governor of California, Gavin Newsomsaid, also on Wednesday, that “vile decision by xAI” of allowing the proliferation of sexually explicit deepfakes led him to urge the attorney general to hold the company accountable.
The social network of Musk, the millionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, said in the meantime that he will “geo-block capacity” by Grok users and X himself to create images of people in “bikinis, underwear and similar pieces” nthe jurisdictions where these actions are considered illegal.
“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing, such as bikinis,” the X security team said in a statement. “This restriction applies to all users, including paid service subscribers“, he added.
As “a additional layer of protection“, the creation of images and the possibility of editing photographs through the Grok do X account are now available only for paid subscribersthe statement added.
According to the AFP agency, an analysis carried out last week by the NGO AI Forensics on more than 20,000 images generated by Grok revealed that more than half portrayed people with little clothingof which 81% were women and approximately 2% looked like they were underage.
The international movement of indignation against Grok and the possibility that Musk’s AI offers to modify images, in particular those published on the social network X, has intensified in recent weeks.
This option was allowing users to create sexualized ‘deepfakes’ of women and minors using indications such as “put her in a bikini” or “take off his clothes“.
That is united, o Grot tried to avoid criticismwith the announcement of a new monetization policy, announcing on X that the generation and editing of images would be “limited to paid service subscribers“.
But this ad only fueled the outrage even more: the office of the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the measure, considering it a insult to victims, and “not a solution”.
In turn, the British media regulator announced the opening of an investigation to determine whether X violated UK legislation regarding sexualized images.
Also the French Commissioner for Children, Sarah El Hairysaid that he had sent the images generated by Grok to the country’s prosecutor’s office, the media regulator Arcom and the European Union — which however requested that the generation of this type of content be immediately blocked.
Further increasing the pressure on Musk’s company, an association of 28 civil society organizations sent open letters to the executive directors of Apple and Google this Wednesday, urging them to ban Grok and X from your app stores.
However, the Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines while India announced that X had deleted thousands of posts and hundreds of user accounts in response to its complaints.
Apparently, then, in moral code of Elon Musk’s companiesthere is no problem in generating, without consent, sexualized images of women and children — as long as it is a paid serviceor just where this practice is not illegal.
