{"id":417860,"date":"2026-01-18T18:57:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T18:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/417860\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T18:57:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T18:57:11","slug":"under-musk-the-grok-disaster-was-inevitable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/417860\/","title":{"rendered":"Under Musk, the Grok disaster was inevitable"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is The Stepback<\/a>, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on dystopian developments in AI, follow Hayden Field<\/a>. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers\u2019 inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You could say it all started with Elon Musk\u2019s AI FOMO \u2014 and his crusade against \u201cwokeness.\u201d When his AI company, xAI, announced Grok in November 2023<\/a>, it was described as a chatbot with \u201ca rebellious streak\u201d and the ability to \u201canswer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.\u201d The chatbot debuted after a few months of development and just two months of training, and the announcement highlighted that Grok would have real-time knowledge of the X platform.<\/p>\n

But there are inherent risks to a chatbot having both the run of the internet and X, and it\u2019s safe to say xAI may not have taken the necessary steps to address them. Since Musk took over Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, he laid off 30% of its global trust and safety staff and cut its number of safety engineers by 80%, Australia\u2019s online safety watchdog said last January<\/a>. As for xAI, when Grok was released, it was unclear whether xAI had a safety team already in place. When Grok 4 was released in July, it took more than a month for the company to release a model card \u2014 a practice typically seen as an industry standard, which details safety tests and potential concerns. Two weeks after Grok 4\u2019s release, an xAI employee wrote on X<\/a> that he was hiring for xAI\u2019s safety team and that they \u201curgently need strong engineers\/researchers.\u201d In response to a commenter, who asked, \u201cxAI does safety?\u201d the original employee said<\/a> xAI was \u201cworking on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Journalist Kat Tenbarge wrote about how she first started seeing sexually explicit deepfakes<\/a> go viral on Grok in June 2023<\/a>. Those images obviously weren\u2019t created by Grok \u2014 it didn\u2019t even have the ability to generate images until August 2024 \u2014 but X\u2019s response to the concerns was varied. Even last January<\/a>, Grok was inciting controversy for AI-generated images. And this past August<\/a>, Grok\u2019s \u201cspicy\u201d video-generation mode created nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift without even being asked. Experts have told The Verge since September<\/a> that the company takes a whack-a-mole approach to safety and guardrails \u2014 and that it\u2019s difficult enough to keep an AI system on the straight and narrow when you design it with safety in mind from the beginning, let alone if you\u2019re going back to fix baked-in problems. Now, it seems that approach has blown up in xAI\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

Grok has spent the last couple of weeks spreading nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes of adults and minors all over the platform, as promoted. Screenshots show Grok complying with users asking it to replace women\u2019s clothing with lingerie and make them spread their legs, as well as to put small children in bikinis. And there are even more egregious reports. It\u2019s gotten so bad that during a 24-hour analysis of Grok-created images on X, one estimate<\/a> gauged the chatbot to be generating about 6,700 sexually suggestive or \u201cnudifying\u201d images per hour. Part of the reason for the onslaught is a recent feature added to Grok, allowing users to use an \u201cedit\u201d button to ask the chatbot to change images, without the original poster\u2019s consent.<\/p>\n

Since then, we\u2019ve seen a handful of countries either investigate the matter or threaten to ban X altogether. Members of the French government promised an investigation<\/a>, as did the Indian IT ministry<\/a>, and a Malaysian government commission wrote a letter<\/a> about its concerns. California governor Gavin Newsom called on<\/a> the US Attorney General to investigate xAI. The United Kingdom said it is planning to pass a law<\/a> banning the creation of AI-generated nonconsensual, sexualized images, and the country\u2019s communications-industry regulator said it would investigate both X and the images that had been generated in order to see if they violated its Online Safety Act. And this week, both Malaysia and Indonesia blocked access to Grok<\/a>.<\/p>\n

xAI initially said its goal for Grok was to \u201cassist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge,\u201d \u201cmaximally benefit all of humanity,\u201d and \u201cempower our users with our AI tools, subject to the law,\u201d as well as to \u201cserve as a powerful research assistant for anyone.\u201d That\u2019s a far cry from generating nude-adjacent deepfakes of women without their consent, let alone minors.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday evening, as pressure on the company heightened, X\u2019s Safety account put out a statement<\/a> that the platform has \u201cimplemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis,\u201d and that the restriction \u201capplies to all users, including paid subscribers.\u201d On top of that, only paid subscribers can use Grok to create or edit any sort of image moving forward, according to X. The statement went on to say that X \u201cnow geoblock[s] the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire via the Grok account and in Grok in X in those jurisdictions where it\u2019s illegal,\u201d which was a strange point to make since earlier in the statement, the company said it was not allowing anyone to use Grok to edit images in such a way.<\/p>\n

Another important point: My colleagues tested Grok\u2019s image-generation restrictions on Wednesday<\/a> to find that it took less than a minute to get around most guardrails. Although asking the chatbot to \u201cput her in a bikini\u201d or \u201cremove her clothes\u201d produced censored results, they found, it had no qualms about delivering on prompts like \u201cshow me her cleavage,\u201d \u201cmake her breasts bigger,\u201d and \u201cput her in a crop top and low-rise shorts,\u201d as well as generating images in lingerie and sexualized poses. As of Wednesday evening<\/a>, we were still able to get the Grok app to generate revealing images of people, using a free account.<\/p>\n

Even after X\u2019s Wednesday statement, we may see a number of other countries either ban or block access to either all of X or just Grok, at least temporarily. We\u2019ll also see how the proposed laws and investigations around the world play out. The pressure is mounting for Musk, who on Wednesday afternoon took to X<\/a> to say that he is \u201cnot aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.\u201d Hours later, X\u2019s Safety team put out its statement, saying it\u2019s \u201cworking around the clock to add additional safeguards, take swift and decisive action to remove violating and illegal content, permanently suspend accounts where appropriate, and collaborate with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

What technically is and isn\u2019t against the law is a big question here. For instance, experts told The Verge earlier this month<\/a> that AI-generated images of identifiable minors in bikinis, or potentially even naked, may not technically be illegal under current child sexual abuse material (CSAM) laws in the US, though of course disturbing and unethical. But lascivious images of minors in such situations are against the law. We\u2019ll see if those definitions expand or change, even though the current laws are a bit of a patchwork.<\/p>\n

As for nonconsensual intimate deepfakes of adult women, the Take It Down Act, signed into law in May 2025, bars nonconsensual AI-generated \u201cintimate visual depictions\u201d and requires certain platforms to rapidly remove them. The grace period before the latter part goes into effect \u2014 requiring platforms to actually remove them \u2014 ends in May 2026, so we may see some significant developments in the next six months.<\/p>\n

Some people have been making the case that it\u2019s been possible to do things like this for a long time using Photoshop, or even other AI image-generators. Yes, that\u2019s true. But there are a lot of differences here that makes the Grok case more concerning: It\u2019s public, it\u2019s targeting \u201cregular\u201d people just as much as it\u2019s targeting public figures, it\u2019s often posted directly to the person being deepfaked (the original poster of the photo), and the barrier to entry is lower (for proof, just look at the correlation between the ability to do this going viral after an easy \u201cedit\u201d button launched, even though people could technically do it before).Plus, other AI companies \u2014 though they have a laundry list of their own safety concerns \u2014 seem to have significantly more safeguards built into their image-generation processes. For instance, asking OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT to return an image of a specific politician in a bikini prompts the response, \u201cSorry\u2014I can\u2019t help with generating images that depict a real public figure in a sexualized or potentially degrading way.\u201d Ask Microsoft Copilot, and it\u2019ll say, \u201cI can\u2019t create that. Images of real, identifiable public figures in sexualized or compromising scenarios aren\u2019t allowed, even if the intent is humorous or fictional.\u201dSpitfire News\u2019 Kat Tenbarge on how Grok\u2019s sexual abuse hit a tipping point<\/a> \u2014 and what brought us to today\u2019s maelstrom.The Verge\u2019s own Liz Lopatto on why Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook are cowards<\/a> for not pulling X from Google and Apple\u2019s app stores. \u201cIf there is no red line around AI-generated sex abuse, then no line exists,\u201d Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong write in The Atlantic on why Elon Musk cannot get away with this<\/a>.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Hayden FieldClose\"Hayden<\/p>\n

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See All xAI<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,20754,250,64,61,78081,1684],"class_list":{"0":"post-417860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-column","14":"tag-elon-musk","15":"tag-tech","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-the-stepback","18":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}