MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Governments around the world have launched investigations into the social media platform X since it started allowing users to make and publish sexualized images of women and children without their permission. Two governments have even banned the company's AI chatbot, Grok, as a result of that feature. Now, NPR's Huo Jingnan reports that X is introducing new safety updates.
HUO JINGNAN, BYLINE: After weeks of mostly ignoring and mocking critics, X now says it will bar users from tagging the Grok chatbot and making sexually explicit public images of real people. Previously, users could ask Grok to edit images and put people into revealing clothing like bikinis. Those images are then published for anyone to see on X. X's owner, Elon Musk, challenged users to break Grok's image moderation, which several quickly did. He blamed lapses on, quote, "adversarial hacking" and said any problems would be fixed immediately. Riana Pfefferkorn is a policy fellow at Stanford University.
RIANA PFEFFERKORN: Clever and motivated users will try to find ways to fool the list that you've already come up with of words and phrases and prompts that shouldn't be complied with, and come up with other proxies for those same concepts in order to get around the safeguards that you're trying to build in.
HUO: Still, the new rules will allow paying users in some parts of the world to undress images in private chats with Grok on X, and there are no restrictions for a standalone version of Grok. So will this be enough for regulators? On Thursday, the British government said these latest steps are a welcome development, but vowed to continue its probe, which could result in X getting banned in the U.K. California officials have also announced an investigation, and the Philippines says it is moving to ban Grok. Closer to home for Musk, influencer Ashley St. Clair, with whom he has a child, is also suing X for publishing sexualized images of her both as an adult and as a teenager.
Huo Jingnan, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICHIKORO'S "ALLY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
