San Francisco, 15 January (H.S.): Elon Musk's platform X announced stringent technological safeguards on Wednesday to thwart its Grok AI chatbot from manipulating images of real individuals into revealing attire like bikinis or underwear, responding to worldwide condemnation over non-consensual sexualized deepfakes targeting women and children.
The safety team affirmed these restrictions encompass all users—including paid subscribers—via geoblocking in jurisdictions deeming such content illegal, following the chatbot's Spicy Mode feature's exploitation through innocuous prompts like put her in a bikini or remove her clothes. This intervention arrived mere hours after California's attorney general initiated a probe into xAI for generating explicit material without consent.
Global Crackdown and Regulatory Backlash
Indonesia pioneered a nationwide Grok ban on Saturday, with Malaysia enforcing access restrictions Sunday, while India prompted X to excise thousands of offending posts and hundreds of accounts per local directives.
Britain's Ofcom launched a compliance investigation Monday into potential UK law breaches, as France's children's commissioner Sarah El Hairy escalated cases to prosecutors, ARCOM regulators, and EU authorities Tuesday.
Musk previously refuted claims of Grok producing minor explicit imagery despite viral evidence, paralleling X's restored Venezuelan access post-Maduro and Grok's Pentagon integration, underscoring AI ethics tensions.
These measures spotlight surging perils in generative AI, where lax guardrails enable harassment via photorealistic fabrications, prompting calls for unified international standards amid xAI's rapid deployment.
X's proactive geofencing aims to preempt legal quagmires without fully curtailing Grok's creative capacities, though critics decry patchwork enforcement favoring wealthier subscribers; concurrent headlines—from Trump's chip tariffs to NASA's orbital evacuation—frame technology's double-edged trajectory under scrutiny.
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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar
