India, EU investigate Musk’s X after Grok created deepfake child porn

Elon Musk‘s X is being investigated by authorities in Europe, India and Malaysia after its Grok chatbot let users create and share AI-generated sexualized images of children and women.

British media watchdog Ofcom also said it’s requested information from X, which is owned by xAI, concerning the Grok issues. And on Sunday, a member of Brazil’s parliament said on social media that she’s asked the country’s federal public prosecutor and data protection authority to suspend use of Grok until an investigation is completed.

The probes follow a global surge over the past few weeks in the use of Grok to create and share nonconsensual, intimate images, or NCII, derived from photos or videos of real people in response to user’s prompts. The concerning images have been widely shared on X.

Musk’s company recently updated its Grok Imagine features, enabling easier image generation from text-based prompts on the platform.

While safety experts and tech critics decried the proliferation of exploitative images and clips on X, Musk appeared to mock the situation by sharing an array of Grok-generated images, including one depicting himself in a bikini, punctuated by laughing-crying emojis.

At a press conference on Monday, European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the authority was “very seriously looking into this matter” and was “well aware” that X and Grok were “now offering a spicy mode showing explicit sexual content with some output generated with childlike images.”

“This is not ‘spicy,'” Regnier said. “This is illegal. This is appalling. This is disgusting. This is how we see it, and this has no place in Europe.”

Late last week, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ordered X to conduct a “comprehensive technical, procedural and governance-level review” of Grok. The company was given until Jan. 5 to comply.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said over the weekend that it’s investigating X and will call in company representatives.

“MCMC urges all platforms accessible in Malaysia to implement safeguards aligned with Malaysian laws and online safety standards, especially in relation to their AI-powered features, chatbots and image manipulation tools,” the group said in a statement.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) called on the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the matter in an interview with CNBC. Dani Pinter, chief legal officer and director of the Law Center for NCOSE, said there’s “not a lot of legal precedence on point for these specific issues.”

However, she said federal laws prohibit the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse materials, or CSAM, and that can be applied to virtually created content “when it depicts an identifiable child, or depicts a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”

Those laws include the Take It Down Act, which was endorsed by First…