Billionaire Elon Musk’s Grok AI violated Canada’s privacy laws and, at one point, generated more than 6,000 sexual deepfake images per hour, Canada’s privacy commissioner found.
“The investigation has found that X Corp and xAI violated Canada’s federal private sector privacy law by launching the Grok AI-powered image generation tool without implementing appropriate safeguards at the outset,” privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne said in a press conference in Ottawa Thursday.
“This lack of protection allowed users to create and share sexualized deepfakes largely targeting women and children,” he added.
Dufresne launched an investigation in January to examine the proliferation of sexualized deepfakes created by Grok and shared on the X social media platform.
“According to researchers, Grok was at one point generating well over 6,000 [sexualized] images per hour,” he said, adding that “millions” of sexual deepfakes were created.
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X and xAI have introduced “new measures, including safeguards to reduce the risk that their tool will be misused to produce sexualized deepfakes, and proactive sweeps to detect and remove this harmful content on their platforms,” he added.
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While Dufresne said he was “encouraged” by the action the company took, he has recommended “additional actions.”
“In response, the companies have committed to, among other things, provide quarterly reports as well as independent third-party audit reports on improvements to safeguards with evidence to demonstrate their effectiveness. These reports are to be submitted until the issue of sexualized deepfakes is fully resolved,” he said.
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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said it will continue to monitor the implementation of these commitments.
The investigation looked at whether the companies involved are complying with privacy law and whether they obtained “valid consent” to collect, use and disclose personal information to create deepfakes, including explicit content.
The wave of images drew a global backlash, with the U.K., the European Union and California launching investigations of their own.
In Canada, the Liberal government has introduced legislation that would criminalize non-consensual sexual deepfakes.
–with files from Canadian Press
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