

Under growing pressure, Elon Musk backs down on nude deepfakes
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Editor’s note (January 15th 2025): This article has been updated to take in developments. FROM DRUG use to libel suits, Elon Musk has long been able to shrug off problems that would have imperilled most bosses.
But the reaction to a recent update to Grok, the AI chatbot linked to X, the billionaire’s social network, has posed a fresh test of his imperviousness. Grok’s willingness to churn out nude deepfakes has led to scrutiny in Britain and Australia, among other places, and outright bans of the chatbot in Malaysia and Indonesia. The flood of deepfakes began after December 24th, when Mr Musk said that Grok had been updated with a new image generator.
The change brought the chatbot to parity with those of Google and OpenAI, but with some big differences. In line with Mr Musk’s desire to create the most anti-censorship, “maximally truth-seeking" chatbot, the system is far less likely than others to refuse requests to generate images that violate content policies. Ask ChatGPT to edit a picture of a real person to strip them to their underwear, and it will demur.
Grok has no such qualms. Moreover, because Grok can be accessed on X, it answers many requests in public. Until another update limited the feature to paying subscribers on January 9th, the chatbot’s public profile was responding to a hundred such “nudification" requests a minute, some of them involving children.
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