Hazel Chu: Grok creates fake, sexualised images without consent and government is OK with that? |
LAST UPDATE | 3 hrs ago
NO ONE SEEMED all that surprised that Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI had recently landed itself in controversy, hitting a new low with its editing images of individuals and putting them in “see-through bikinis”, “covering them in oil” or “stripping them down to their underwear”.
With no safeguards from the platform in place, Grok complied with user prompts and, as such, began the mass creation of non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes; the overwhelming majority of which were of women and, in some cases, children.
Analysts from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) charity in the UK found “criminal imagery” of girls aged between 11 and 13, which “appears to have been created” using Grok. CNN found that Grok fulfilled a user’s request to generate an image of the body of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, into a bikini.
The Grok app on an iPhone, against the backdrop of search results displayed on the social media platform X. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
The Rape Crisis Centre, and various legal experts have called for an outright ban on AI features that enable the creation of such deepfakes and apps that would “nudify” individuals. To the everyday public, this seems like a very common sense approach and request.
Yet one that Government seems not to entirely agree, on the back of the Grok controversy, Minister of Enterprise Peter Burke stated that the laws were “robust” whilst his colleague Minister of Media, Patrick O’Donovan claimed that the onus lies primarily on users rather than platforms, stating “Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s a choice of a person to make these images”. He today insisted his comments were taken ‘out of context’, but not before the minister had deleted his own account from X.
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Patrick O’Donovan was criticised when he said that X is not responsible for making child sexual abuse images. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo........