On Tuesday, French prosecutors from the cybercrime unit searched the offices of social media platform X as part of an investigation into allegations that included spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. It appears the platform’s AI chat box, Grok, went off the rails once again. Last summer, Grok produced numerous antisemitic comments including Holocaust denial garbage that spread world wide. Authorities also summoned Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for “voluntary interviews” on Apr. 20.
X and Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain’s data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.
“At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French law, insofar as it operates within the national territory,” the prosecutor’s office said in a press release.
A recent study estimated that Grok could have produced up to three million sexualized images in 11 days in January, including 23,000 of children.