At least 37 attorneys general for US states and territories are taking action against xAI after people used its chatbot, Grok, to generate a flood of sexualized images earlier this year.
On Friday, a bipartisan group of 35 attorneys general published an open letter to xAI demanding it “immediately take all available additional steps to protect the public and users of your platforms, especially the women and girls who are the overwhelming target of (non-consensual intimate images).” (In addition to those who signed the letter, attorneys general from California and Florida tell WIRED they have also taken action.)
The letter comes amid an international wave of regulator attention on Grok users creating intimate deepfake images of people without their consent, as well as sexualized images of children.
A recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that during an 11-day period starting on December 29, Grok’s account on X generated around 3 million photorealistic sexualized images, including around 23,000 sexualized images of children. In addition to using Grok’s X account to create these photos, people were generating far more explicit videos using the Grok Imagine model available on the Grok website, WIRED previously reported. And unlike X, the Grok site did not appear to require any sort of age verification before allowing people to view content.
X did not respond to a request for comment. xAI responded to WIRED’s questions with, “Legacy Media Lies.”
The open letter from attorneys general, which cited WIRED’s reporting, said that Grok’s ability to create nonconsensual sexual imagery has been used as a “selling point” by xAI.
While xAI claims it has stopped Grok’s X account from undressing people, the letter stated the company hasn’t removed nonconsensually created content, “despite the fact that you will soon be obligated to do so by federal law.” It also calls on xAI to remove Grok’s ability to depict people in revealing clothing or suggestive poses, suspend offending users and report them to authorities, and give users the ability to control whether their content can be edited by Grok.
“In addition to investigations and prosecutions in this area, we have called on payment processors and search engines to mitigate the creation of nonconsensual intimate images and advocated for legislation to prevent AI-powered child exploitation,” the letter says.
The inundation of nonconsensual intimate deepfakes on X and Grok.com comes at a time when half the country has already passed age verification laws, requiring people looking at pornography to provide proof that they are not a minor.
WIRED contacted the offices of attorneys general in the 25 states that have passed age verification laws to ask how they were responding to the influx of nonconsensual sexualized images on Grok and X. WIRED also reached out to the sponsors of the age verification bills in each of those states to ask if they felt X or xAI should be doing more to prevent children from viewing explicit content on X and Grok.com.
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