There are three major countries that have now threatened action against Elon Musk’s social media app after its chatbot was caught making disturbing images.
Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, is at the center of controversy after its AI bot, known as Grok, created sexualized images of women and children.
In response to prompts from users, Grok created images of both women and children dressed in bikinis.
This issue first arose last month when a new feature was rolled out that added an ‘edit image’ button.
Advert
This enabled users to modify images on the platform, resulting in a spike of images of real people being stripped to nearly nude.
Now, countries are speaking out in anger, with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission stating that creating this type of content is an offense.
It said: “While X is not presently a licensed service provider, it has the duty to prevent dissemination of harmful content on its platform.”
Meanwhile, Indian authorities took to X to announce it was ordering a review of Grok to make sure that it did not create content with ‘nudity, sexualization, sexually explicit or otherwise unlawful content’.
And the public outrage doesn’t end there because France has also accused the AI bot of creating ‘clearly illegal’ sexual content without the consent of the people in the imagery.
France added that this potentially violates the EU Digital Services Act
The public prosecutor’s office located in Paris has also expanded its investigation into X to now include these new accusations.
Dani Pinter, who is the chief legal officer and director of the Law Center for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said that the social media app had failed to remove abusive images from its AI training material.
Speaking to Reuters, Pinter said: “This was an entirely predictable and avoidable atrocity.”
However, this doesn’t seem to have worried Musk as the tech mogul even took to his social media platform to joke about the controversy.
In response to edits of famous people, including images of himself, in bikinis, Musk replied with cry-laughing emojis.
However, as the outcry grew bigger, Musk has made a post to say: “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
This comes just weeks after the boss of Microsoft AI has issued a major warning over ‘uncontrollable’ artificial intelligence.
Mustafa Suleyman appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today where he said that fears over the future of AI are ‘health and necessary’.