Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot on his social media platform X, is stirring up controversy. After the AI chatbot spewed nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images, the EU opened a formal investigation into X. The investigation will examine whether Grok is living up to its obligations under the Digital Services Act, the bloc’s wide-ranging rule book for keeping internet users safe from harmful content and products. “Non-consensual sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” Henna Virkkunen, an executive vice president at the commission, said in a statement. Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, alleges that X’s executives knew Grok could generate explicit, nonconsensual images from real photos of victims and failed to implement industry standard safeguards.
In a related story, Paris Hilton has travelled to Washington to put her famous name behind a proposed law to fight what she calls an “epidemic” of deepfakes. The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (or DEFIANCE Act) would make it easier for victims to sue the creators of deepfake pornography. The bill passed the US Senate unanimously and has bipartisan backing in the House of Representatives.
For our younger readers who may not know who Hilton is, she was the victim of one of the most infamous leaked sex tapes in the early days of the internet. “People called it a scandal,” Hilton said. “It wasn’t. It was abuse. There were no laws at the time to protect me…They sold my pain for clicks and then they told me to be quiet, to move on, to even be grateful for the attention.”
