Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is facing international censure after generating sexual abuse material on social media platform X, including depictions of minors, in response to user prompts.
Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Commission said it is investigating images produced by Grok following complaints about the misuse of AI to manipulate images of women and minors. In a statement, the regulator warned that creating or transmitting such content is an offence under Malaysian law and said it would summon representatives from X. “While X is not presently a licensed service provider, it has the duty to prevent dissemination of harmful content on its platform,” the commission said.
India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has ordered a comprehensive review of Grok to ensure it does not generate “nudity, sexualisation, sexually explicit or otherwise unlawful content,” Bloomberg reported. The platform must submit an action report within 72 hours and faces possible legal action under criminal and IT laws.
Information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told CNBC-TV 18: “The Parliamentary Committee has recommended a strong law for regulating social media. We are considering it.”
France accused Grok of generating “clearly illegal” sexual content on X without consent and said the images potentially violate the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires large platforms to mitigate the risk of illegal content spreading, Bloomberg reported.
xAI acknowledged failures in safeguards and said fixes are being prioritised. In a post on X responding to users, Grok stated: “There are isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing. xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely.” The company added from the @Grok account: “As noted, we’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them – CSAM is illegal and prohibited.”
Musk wrote on X that the platform takes action against illegal content, including related to children, by removing it, permanently suspending accounts and working with officials. “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” he said.
The Guardian noted that Grok has previously posted misinformation and offensive material, including references to far-right conspiracy theories and antisemitic content, with xAI later apologising. The outlet also cited research on the broader problem of AI facilitating child sexual abuse material, including a 2023 Stanford study that found a training dataset used by popular image generators contained over 1,000 CSAM images.
xAI did not provide comment beyond an emailed reply to The Guardian stating: “Legacy Media Lies.”
