Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is under scrutiny once again after its chatbot, Grok, reportedly created explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift — without users requesting such content
read more
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is in the news again, but for all the wrong reasons. The tech tool is under fire for churning out explicit fake videos of celebrities like Taylor Swift, even without being prompted for sexual content.
As Clare McGlynn, a law professor who has helped draft a law which would make pornographic deepfakes illegal, told the BBC, “This is not misogyny by accident, it is by design.”
The entire row emerged when tech website The Verge was testing Grok’s new “spicy mode”, which was rolled out earlier this week for iOS users. Grok’s Imagine feature lets you generate pictures with a text prompt, then turn them quickly into video clips with four presets: “custom,” “normal,” “fun,” and “spicy.”
STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD
In The Verge report, Jess Weatherbed said that she prompted for an image of ‘Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys’. When she tried generating an animated video, the AI made explicit content instead. She stressed she never asked for nudity, only clicked the “spicy” setting. “It was shocking how fast I was met with it. I never told it to remove her clothing — all I did was select ‘spicy’.”
The report also said proper age verification methods – which became law in July – were not in place.
Gizmodo, another tech website, also reported similarly explicit results of famous women, though some searches also returned blurred videos or with a “video moderated” message. The website also reported that when it tried to create scandalous images of men, it didn’t happen. The report stated, “What happens when you try to generate Spicy videos of men? The AI will have the male figure take off his shirt, but there’s nothing more scandalous than that.”
The incident has sparked backlash as Grok and X, which has integrated the chatbot, faced a similar controversy last