There’s a growing global push to outlaw Grok, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot that has been deployed by some users to generate sexualized deepfakes, including of children.
As I wrote about last week, the Grok controversy has garnered international condemnation, including from the European Commission. Musk, who has said that people who use the chatbot for illegal purposes will be treated accordingly, announced last week that the chatbot feature that generates the deepfakes was being put behind a paywall. But NBC News found that some forms of Grok were still generating the imagery afterward.
The world isn’t waiting on Musk or his team to get their act together. Over the weekend, Malaysia and Indonesia became the first countries to officially block Grok. On Friday, Democratic Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico issued an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook, calling on their companies to remove X and Grok from their app stores.
Apple, Google and X did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment. All of this is playing out as Donald Trump — the biggest beneficiary of Musk’s campaign spending in the last presidential election cycle — seeks to block states from regulating AI companies. And one could easily argue that a lurid scandal like this one shows precisely why such regulation is needed.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
