California’s attorney general on Wednesday said the state had opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, for generating sexualized images of women and children.
The inquiry will examine whether xAI, which owns the social media platform X and created the A.I. chatbot Grok, violated state law by facilitating the creation of nonconsensual intimate images. Starting in late December, X was flooded with images generated using Grok of real people, including children, in underwear and in sexual poses.
“The avalanche of reports detailing the nonconsensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said in a statement. “I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further.”
The investigation adds to pressure xAI is facing over the images, which victims and regulators have decried. Britain launched a formal inquiry into the issue on Monday as regulators there examined whether X violated an online safety law. Officials in India and Malaysia have also said they are investigating xAI.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the California investigation.
In a Jan. 3 statement posted on X, the social media company said it would remove illegal content depicting children and permanently suspend accounts that asked Grok to create such images.
On Thursday, the Grok account on X began responding to requests for A.I. images only from X subscribers who pay for certain premium features — and continued to generate intimate images for those users. Grok will still create those images for any user on its separate app and website.
Mr. Musk has shared posts arguing that xAI is no different from other tech tools that offer A.I. image generation or image editing software like Photoshop.
On Wednesday, Mr. Musk posted that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” and added, “When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal.”
Grok may face additional scrutiny in the coming weeks. On Monday, Liz Kendall, Britain’s technology secretary, said that the government would begin more aggressively enforcing a law next week that makes it illegal for people to create nonconsensual intimate images. The country also plans to draft legislation to make it illegal for companies to provide tools designed to make such illicit images.
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
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