Indonesia and Malaysia have restricted access to Elon Musk’s Grok AI after pornographic content was generated by the chatbot.
Indonesia was the first country to ban the X chatbot. The country’s Communications and Digital Affairs Ministry said it imposed the temporary ban “to protect women, children, and the entire community from the risk of fake pornographic content generated using artificial intelligence technology”.
“The government views non-consensual deepfake sexual practices as a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and national security in the digital space,” Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid said in the statement.
Following suit, Malaysia’s internet provider said it is limiting access to Grok until safeguards are put in place.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission added that it issued notices to X Corp. and xAI LLC to prevent AI-generated content that may contravene Malaysian law, but the company’s responses failed to address the inherent risks posed by the AI tool.
The bans follow Elon Musk’s xAI, which owns Grok, restricting the image generation feature for most users on the X platform, following widespread condemnation for generating undressed images of women and children.
Users now require a paid subscription to generate and edit images, whereas the feature was initially introduced for free with daily limits.
Several regulators across the world, including the United Kingdom have launched inquiries and criticised the move by xAi as insufficient.
The standalone Grok app, outside of X, still allows users to generate pictures without subscribers.
