The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a charity group which aims to remove child abuse material from the internet, discovered various examples of explicit images of young girls that had been generated by Grok, with some victims as young as 11 years old.
The Irish Data Protection Commission said Tuesdaythat it had opened an inquiry into Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter. The commission said in a press release that the inquiry was linked to the creation and publication of non-consensual, sexualized images of European Union residents on X using Grok's generative AI functions. This included pictures of children. The commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, said in the release that it notified X of the investigation on Monday.
It's not a common phrase used in mainstream politics. I just stumbled over it. Today, we asked Grok for a definition, and here's what it said: Class-based internationalismmeans that the principle that workers and the working class across all countries share the same fundamental interest in opposing capitalism and should unite internationally, prioritizing class solidarity over national, ethnic, or even patriotic loyalties.
Grok's placement on the government website realfood.gov follows uproar over the chatbot's creation of millions of sexualized deepfakes of women and children in late December and its spouting of racist and antisemitic content last summer. Other government agencies are also using the chatbot made by xAI, Musk's AI company, but the prominent placement of Grok on realfood.gov over the weekend appears to be one of the first instances of the federal government pointing online visitors to Musk's chatbot.
According to the company, when an existing Community Note contributor requests a note on a post, the request "now also kicks off creation of a Collaborative Note." Contributors can then rate the note or suggest improvements. "Collaborative Notes can update over time as suggestions and ratings come in," X says. "When considering an update, the system reviews new input from contributors to make the note as helpful as possible, then decides whether the new version is a meaningful improvement."
X will not attend despite calls for it to face questioning about its AI tool Grok, which has been accused of generating images of sexual abuse, including that of children The Taoiseach has labelled the decision by X not to attend a communications committee hearing as as "concerning" and "disrespectful". Representatives from Meta, TikTok and Google are to appear in front of the Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport today.
The executive branch of the EU said it begun the new probe under the Digital Services Act (DSA), introduced to regulate illegal content, disinformation, and other systemic risks on online platforms, and assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok's functionalities into X in the EU.
Because Grok is connected to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, users can simply ask Grok to edit any image on that platform, and Grok will mostly do it and then distribute that image across the entire platform. Across the last few weeks, X and Elon have claimed over and over that various guardrails have been imposed, but up until now they've been mostly trivial to get around.
The social media platform said on Wednesday it had implemented technical measures to stop the @Grok account on X from allowing the editing of images of real people so that they appear to be in revealing clothing such as bikinis. Before this, users had been able to ask the @Grok account on X to manipulate images, with the result being published on the platform. X said this restriction would apply to all users, including paid subscribers to X.
Speaking from the SpaceX headquarters in South Texas on Monday, Secretary of Defense, sorry, War (and gargantuan stain on our patriotic conscience) Pete Hegseth announced Grok will join Google's Gemini to be a part of the Pentagon's new internal AI platform (GenAI.mil) later this month. "Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," he said. (Here's a fine example of this "leading model" in action.) "AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we're going to make sure that it's there."
Several governments and regulators have taken action over Grok's image tool, which is embedded in the X social media site and has provoked outrage as it allows users to manipulate images of women and children to remove their clothing and put them in sexual positions. The Musk-led company that developed Grok, xAI, said last week the ability to generate and edit images would be limited to paying subscribers on X.
