The Canadian privacy watchdog has found that Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot violated privacy laws by creating sexual deepfakes. The AI image generation tool lacked sufficient safeguards and did not adequately consider privacy concerns. An investigation initiated by the privacy commissioner in January focused on the proliferation of sexualized deepfakes generated by Grok and shared on the X social media platform.
It was revealed that Grok was responsible for producing millions of sexualized deepfakes. The investigation aimed to assess compliance with privacy regulations by the companies involved and determine if they had obtained valid consent for collecting, using, and disclosing personal information to create explicit deepfake content.
The release of these images sparked international scrutiny, leading to investigations by the U.K., the European Union, and California. Musk’s xAI subsequently implemented additional restrictions on Grok following the public outcry over the sexual images.