Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot run by billionaire Elon Musk, said this week that it may have violated U.S. laws regarding child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The incident comes amid ongoing concerns over what some say are the AI chatbot’s apparent lack of guardrails.
In a post to X on Wednesday, Grok said that it “generated and shared an AI image of two young girls,” estimated to be between 12 and 16, “in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt.”
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“This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM,” Grok said. “It was a failure in safeguards, and I’m sorry for any harm caused.”
The user who made the prompt has since had their account suspended.
Few answers about fixes
The company behind Musk’s chatbot, xAI, is reviewing the incident “to prevent future issues,” Grok said.
An inquiry sent by Straight Arrow News to xAI’s press email was met with what appeared to be an automated reply: “Legacy Media Lies.”
In another post on X, Grok referred to the issue as an isolated case and said that urgent fixes were being issued after “lapses in safeguards” were identified.
SAN could not determine what, if any, steps xAI has taken to remedy the issue.
Grok generates sexualized images of adult women, too
While the company may be addressing the sexualization of minors, Grok continues to allow the same prompts to be used on images of women without their consent.
SAN’s analysis of Grok’s replies shows women being undressed as of Friday afternoon. In one example, Grok responded with a sexualized image after a user asked to change a woman’s outfit “to a bikini made of a single string of dental floss.”
What appears to be an increasing number of women across the platform have been openly demanding in recent weeks that xAI take action.
“Literally woke up to so many comments asking Grok to put me in a thong / bikini and the results having so many bookmarks,” one X user posted this week. “Even worse I went onto the Grok page and saw slimy disgusting lowlifes doing that to pictures of CHILDREN. Genuinely disgusting.”
The problem isn’t the first for Grok, which has received pushback since its launch in 2023. Just last month, the chatbot stirred controversy after it shared the home address of Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.
Grok also faced pushback in July after it began making anti-semitic remarks while referring to itself as “MechaHitler.” The remarks came shortly after Musk said the chatbot had received a major update in response to complaints from X users that its replies showed a left-wing bias.
