The long-running controversy around Elon Muks’s Grok chatbot’s non-consensual, sexually explicit image generation is resulting in restrictions, as Indonesia and Malaysia have temporarily banned the xAI’s chatbot.
The suspension of Musk’s AI service, which is also deep-rooted into his social media platform X, comes in response to a surge in the production in sexualised, AI-generated imagery.
Most of the time, these images depict real women and minors, sometimes incorporating violent elements, and have been shared in response to user requests on X.
In a statement shared with The Guardian and other media outlets, Indonesia’s communications and digital minister, Meutya Hafid, emphasised that the government takes non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a grave violation of human rights and the dignity of citizens in the digital world.
He ministry has also summoned officials from X to discuss the matter further.
Over the past few days, various governments reacted to Grok’s inappropriate content generation in their own ways. For instance, India’s IT ministry has ordered X to take measures against Grok’s generation of obscene content, while the European Commission has requested that the company preserve all documents related to Grok, indicating the start of an investigation.
Similarly, in the UK, the communications regulator Ofcom stated it will determine if 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.
Responding to the ire, xAI acknowledged that a post from Grok violated ethical standards and restricted the AI image-generation feature to paying subscribers on X, although the Grok app still allows unrestricted image generation.
