Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok posted on Friday that the social media platform has been shut down due to a lapse in security measures.
Screenshots shared by users on X showed Grok’s public media tab filled with such images. XAI said it is working on improving its systems to prevent future incidents.
“There are isolated cases where users requested and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing,” Grok said in a statement. Post In response to a user on “XAI has security measures in place, but improvements are ongoing to completely prevent such requests.”
“As noted, we have identified vulnerabilities in security measures and are promptly fixing them – CSAM is illegal and prohibited,” XAI Posted On the @Grok account on X, referring to child sexual abuse material.
A number of users on Musk pointed to this trend on Thursday by reposting an AI photo of himself in a bikini, captioned with crying-laughing emojis.
According to the chatbot’s posts, Grok’s generation of sexually explicit images appears to lack safety guardrails, allowing minors to be depicted in posts of people, usually women, wearing skimpy clothing. In a response to a user on
When contacted for comment by email, xAI replied with the message: “Legacy media lies”.
The problem of using AI to generate child sexual abuse material is a long-standing problem in the artificial intelligence industry. 2023 stanford study found A dataset used to train several popular AI image-generation tools contains over 1000 CSAM images. Experts say training AI on images of child abuse could allow models to generate new images of children being exploited.
Grok also has a history of failing to maintain its safety guardrails and posting false information. In May last year, Grok began posting about a far-right conspiracy of “white genocide” in South Africa on posts that had no connection to the concept. xAI also apologized in July after Grok began posting rape fantasies and anti-Semitic content, including calling himself “MechaHitler” and praising Nazi ideology. Yet the company secured a nearly $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense a week after the events.
