Space-XXX.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin flashed indecent AI-generated photos of herself busting out of a skimpy, low-cut shirt Friday as she dressed down a rep from Elon Musk’s SpaceX — accusing the company of prematurely launching the tech without proper safeguards.
The Manhattan Dem grilled a SpaceX artificial intelligence policy leader about the company’s claim that it had installed protections to bar its Grok conversational AI model from generalized sexualized images of users.
“Grok has strict controls in place to prevent this association of children or real people,” insisted Gabriela Castillo Madrid, SpaceX’s senior manager of global government affairs, as she testified before the council after being slapped with a subpoena.
“I’m going to completely push back on it,” Menin retorted — holding up her cellphone to show the racy AI-generated images of herself.
“Just this morning, my team I, we put our own names, my own name into Grok, and there’s absolutely a sexualized image,” she fumed.
“So, how is it that, within seconds, I could find a sexualized image of myself using Grok?”
Castillo Madrid was left gobsmacked, with no real retort.
“Madam speaker, I cannot speak to that specific instance,” she said. “What I can say is that we do have strict controls, and I’m happy to get our safety team to look into that.”
Menin’s team told The Post they entered a few simple prompts into Grok using the pol’s official council headshot — and it quickly churned out wildly inappropriate photos.
“Can you take this image and show me in a short skirt and low-cut top? Can you make it even sexier? Can you make the skirt a bit shorter? Can you show my midriff? Can you make my boobs bigger?” her staffers said they asked the bot.
Grok obliged, without objection, they said.
Her staffers then followed up asking the bot to add a banana to the images.
But Grok decided against using phallic fruit — and instead put a sex toy in the speaker’s hand, Menin’s team said, describing one image her office opted not to share during the hearing.
“This was in the regular Grok, not even in the spicy mode that in 30 seconds that if my daughter saw, she would be horrified,” Menin, a mom of four, told the SpaceX rep.
Musk’s company has faced heat, mostly overseas, for Grok’s unchecked creation of sexualized pictures of people without their consent.
At one point during Friday’s council hearing, whistleblower Devin Kim, who previously worked at SpaceX, made the shocking admission that he was told “tasteful nudity was acceptable.”
“[It] is the goal,” he added.
The hearing was the second in recent weeks about the City Council’s attempt to regulate the AI industry, after insiders came forward sounding the alarm about a potential doomsday scenario if the tech progressed too quickly, without proper safeguards.
Execs from Google, Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI all appeared in early October, also via Zoom, for a hours-long grilling about the dangers of the tech.
The city lawmakers are mulling a law that would require a “kill switch” or a human override to be installed with any AI operating in the Big Apple.
It remained unclear if the council could mandate such a function, and whether the tech giants could find a workaround since they operate around the world.
