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Elon Musk's Grok slammed over sexualized images of minors and women

Technews

Elon Musk's Grok slammed over sexualized images of minors and women

By Ica Hontiveros-Cheng

Samantha Smith and Elon Musk

Samantha Smith and Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok was the subject of international scrutiny on Friday (US time) due to reports of users on X (formerly Twitter) asking the chatbot to undress women –(as well as men, and children) to make them appear in bikinis or in sexually suggestive situations, without their consent.

An update late in December of an ‘Edit Image’ button in Grok allowed users to issue the prompt.

Samantha Smith, a journalist, shared in a post on X about her image being altered. “(I felt) dehumanized and reduced to a sexual stereotype,” Smith told the BBC.

“Women are not consenting to this,” Smith said.

When requested for a comment, XAI, the company behind Grok, responded with: “Legacy media lies”.

Meanwhile on X, Grok has replied to reports from concerned users on the edited images with: “As noted, we've identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them—CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) is illegal and prohibited.”

This is not the first time that the AI chatbot has been linked with generating sexual content. Last August, Grok was accused of creating sexually explicit video clips of Taylor Swift even without a prompt through their ‘Spicy mode’ feature.

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