Musk’s Grok blocked by Indonesia, Malaysia over sexualized images in world first

By Lex Harvey, CNN

(CNN) — Elon Musk’s Grok has been blocked by Indonesia and Malaysia, the first countries to do so after the artificial intelligence tool’s “digital undressing” function flooded the internet with photos of women and minors in suggestive and obscene manipulated images.

International pressure has been mounting on Musk to rein in Grok on the heels of a viral trend where users have asked the AI tool to generate sexually explicit deepfakes.

Grok is a tool on Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Indonesia’s digital minister Meutya Hafid said in a statement Saturday the ban was to “protect women, children and the broader public from the risks of fake pornographic content generated using artificial intelligence technology.”

Malaysia announced its own temporary ban Sunday following “the repeated misuse of Grok to generate obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, grossly offensive, and non-consensual manipulated images, including content involving women and minors.”

Indonesia and Malaysia are both Muslim-majority countries with strict anti-pornography laws.

CNN has reached out to parent company xAI for comment.

Officials in the United Kingdom, European Union and India have also expressed concerns about Grok’s guardrails.

Previously Musk and xAI said they were tackling the issue by permanently suspending offending accounts and “working with local governments and law enforcement.” But Grok’s responses to user requests were still flooded with images sexualizing women

Grok is seen by many users as an outlier compared to other mainstream AI models by allowing, and in some cases promoting, sexually explicit content and companion avatars.

The surge in the digital undressing trend began late last year when many users discovered they could tag Grok on X and make it manipulate images.

Users have prompted the chatbot to generate images of people in bikinis and posing suggestively, causing distress to hundreds of thousands of women worldwide.

Researchers at AI Forensics, a European non-profit that investigates algorithms, analyzed over 20,000 random images generated by Grok and 50,000 user requests between December 25 and January 1.

The researchers found “a high prevalence of terms including ‘her’ ‘put’/’remove,’ ‘bikini,’ and ‘clothing.’”

More than half of the images generated of people “contained individuals in minimal attire such as underwear or bikinis.”

Musk pushes back against censorship

Publicly, Musk has long advocated against “woke” AI models and what he calls censorship.

But the billionaire has pushed back against guardrails for Grok within the firm, one source with knowledge of the situation at xAI told CNN.

The xAI safety team, already small compared to its competitors, lost several staffers in the weeks leading up to the controversy.

Musk has said anyone who uses Grok to make illegal content will face consequences. But he has largely dismissed concerns about sexual content on the app, arguing governments “just want to suppress free speech” and responding to criticism with emojis.

Last week, Grok limited some of its image generation features to paid X subscribers, but the restrictions only apply to one of the ways users interact with Grok.

Non-subscribers can still request Grok to edit images on the app, and image and video generation functions are still offered for free through its standalone website and app.

On Monday, the UK’s communications services regulator opened a formal investigation into X to determine whether it has complied with its duties to protect people in Britain from illegal content.

Undressed images of people may amount to intimate image abuse or pornography, while sexualized images of children may represent child sexual abuse material, Ofcom said in a statement.

If the regulator finds that X has broken the law, it can levy a fine of up to £18 million ($24 million) or 10% of the company’s qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater.

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CNN’s Hadas Gold, Trista Kurniawan and Olesya Dmitracova contributed reporting.