The long-running controversy surrounding Elon Muks’ Grok chatbot generating sexually explicit images without consent is resulting in restrictions as Indonesia and Malaysia have temporarily banned xAI’s chatbot.
The suspension of Musk’s AI service, which is also deeply rooted in his social media platform X, comes in response to an increase in the production of sexualized, AI-generated images.
Most of the time, these images show real women and minors, sometimes with violent elements, and have been shared in response to user requests on X.
In a statement shared with The Guardian and other media, Indonesia’s Minister of Communications and Digital, Meutya Hafid, emphasized that the government takes sexual deepfakes without consent as a serious violation of human rights and the dignity of citizens in the digital world.
The ministry has also summoned officials from X to discuss the matter further.
Over the past few days, various governments have responded to Grok’s inappropriate content generation in their own ways. For example, India’s IT Ministry has ordered X to take action against Grok’s generation of obscene content, while the European Commission has requested that the company keep all documents related to Grok, indicating the start of an investigation.
Similarly in the UK, the communications regulator Ofcom stated that it will determine whether compliance issues warrant further investigation. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed his full support for Ofcom’s actions.
The Trump administration in the US remained silent on the issue, despite Democratic senators urging Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores.
In response to the outrage, xAI acknowledged that a post by Grok violated ethical standards and limited the AI image generation feature to paying subscribers of X, although the Grok app still allows unlimited image generation.
