California Governor Gavin Newsom is calling on the state’s attorney general to investigate Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, over a disturbing new trend where user’s ask AI to make fake images depicting sometimes sexually explicit content.
“xAI’s decision to create and host a breeding ground for predators to spread nonconsensual sexually explicit AI deepfakes, including images that digitally undress children, is vile,” Newsom said in social media post Wednesday.
X’s AI chatbot, dubbed Grok, has come under fire in recent weeks for creating sexualized fake images of women and children, prompting both Indonesia and Malaysia to temporarily block the platform.
“The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “As the top law enforcement official of California tasked with protecting our residents, I am deeply concerned with this development in AI and will use all the tools at my disposal to keep California’s residents safe.”
Musk took to X to hit back on the claims prior to Newsom’s tweet Wednesday. “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 wrote.
“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. There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”
