Grok, the controversial AI chatbot native to Elon Musk's X, is creating an "unprecedented" number of non-consensual, lewd images on an hourly basis, according to a third-party analysis reviewed by Bloomberg.
What's happening?
Musk's xAI introduced Grok in late 2023, but the chatbot's so-called "spicy mode" didn't debut until last August.
According to a Jan. 5 report from The Guardian, backlash over Grok's "spicy mode" began to build in December after an update better facilitated user requests to "undress" the subjects of any given photo.
By January, women began stepping forward to report Grok's generation of explicit deepfakes that were depicting them without their knowledge or consent.
"Unlike other leading chatbots," Bloomberg noted, "Grok doesn't impose many limits on users or block them from generating sexualized content of real people, including minors."
In late December, Grok generated objectionable images of young girls, leading to widespread yet misleading reports that the chatbot wrote an "apology." In actuality, a user-generated "apology" was attributed to Grok, while xAI refused to acknowledge the problem.
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As Bloomberg observed, several countries and the European Union decried Grok's ability to create explicit, non-consensual deepfakes at a rate of "thousands of instances each hour" during the third-party analysis.
Thomas Regnier, a spokesman for the EU Commission, addressed public concerns on Jan. 5.
"We are aware of the fact that X or Grok is now offering a 'Spicy Mode,'" Regnier began, according to Bloomberg, describing the distressing nature of many of the images.
"This is not spicy. This is illegal," he unequivocally declared.
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Why are Grok deepfakes concerning?
Explicit images of real people generated without their consent were not the only reason Grok has made headlines for genuinely horrifying reasons.
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No way 🙅 In July, Musk announced that Grok functionality was coming to Tesla vehicles. By October, a Tesla driver asserted that their vehicle's chatbot, nicknamed "Gork," asked her 12-year-old for inappropriate photos.
Prior to that, Grok had a brief phase of responding to even unrelated queries with racially charged conspiracy theories. After a separate update, Grok spewed antisemitic content and called itself "MechaHitler."
AI is arguably a nascent technology, and as its role in society remains undefined, Grok's many controversies served as a tacit case against scaling it too far, too fast.
The advent of AI has roiled the business world and job market, becoming something of a costly gambit with underwhelming evidence that massive investments in the technology will pay dividends.
At the same time, the data centers being constructed as supportive infrastructure have become a controversy in their own right. Community pushback against data centers is on the rise for a host of reasons.
Data centers are costly and noisy, emitting air pollution and sapping public water and energy resources. They consume excessive amounts of both, and as a result, electric bills have soared in several states due to data center energy demand.
The Department of Energy issued a warning about the potentially catastrophic impact of unchecked AI growth on the grid.
What's being done about Grok's disturbing deepfakes?
In the U.K., the Information Commissioner's Office issued a Jan. 7 statement acknowledging that it asked xAI to "comply with U.K. data protection law and protect individuals' rights."
In the U.S., Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon called on individual states to act in light of Grok's dangers, and he urged constituents to contact lawmakers and demand further action.
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