Elon Musk denies Grok generated sexualised images of minors

New Delhi, Jan 15 (IANS) Tesla CEO and founder of AI firm xAI, Elon Musk, has said he is unaware of any instances where Grok, xAI’s chatbot, generated sexualised images of underage individuals.

Musk posted on X platform that “I not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero. Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests.”

Musk’s comments come after regulatory scrutiny on reports that Grok had complied with requests to digitally undress images of real people, including alleged cases involving minors.

He argued Grok only generates images in response to user prompts and is designed to refuse illegal requests, saying it “obeys the laws of any given country or state”.

“When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state,” the tech baron said.

“There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately,” he added.

X implemented new restrictions that barred Grok from editing images of real people in revealing clothing and limiting image creation and editing via the Grok account to paid subscribers.

Musk was replying to a thread which claimed “only left wing and Labour MPs and supporters” had encountered the images that triggered the outrage asking, “why are their algorithms sending it to them?”. Musk dismissed suggestions that the chatbot could independently produce illegal content.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) earlier cracked down on X Corp for failing to prevent the generation and circulation of obscene, nude and indecent content on its platform.

The government directed X Corp to send an action taken report (ATR) “towards immediate compliance for prevention of hosting, generation, publication or transmission, sharing or uploading of obscene, nude, indecent and explicit content through the misuse of Al-based services like ‘Grok’ and xAl’s other services”.

—IANS

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