Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Saturday said that anyone using Grok AI to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content, a day after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) cracked down on X Corp for failing to prevent the generation and circulation of obscene, nude and indecent content on its platform.
Musk replied to DogeDesigner, the UI/UX and graphic designer of the DOGE team, on X, who posted that some people are saying Grok is creating inappropriate images.
"But that's like blaming a pen for writing something bad. A pen doesn't decide what gets written. The person holding it does. Grok works the same way. What you get depends a lot on what you put in. Think about it," DogeDesigner posted.
Musk replied: "Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content".
On Friday, the government directed X Corp to send an action taken report (ATR) "towards immediate compliance for prevention of hosting, generation, publication or transmission, sharing or uploading of obscene, nude, indecent and explicit content through the misuse of Al-based services like 'Grok' and xAl's other services" within 72 hours.
The directive states that "non-compliance with these requirements shall be viewed seriously and may result in strict legal consequences against your platform, its responsible officers and the users on the platform who violate the law, without any further notice, under the IT Act, the IT Rules, the BNSS, the BNS and other applicable laws".
The ministry directed X to conduct a comprehensive review of Grok's technical and governance frameworks to prevent the generation of unlawful content.
It said Grok must enforce strict user policies, including suspension and termination of violators. All offending content should be immediately removed without tampering with evidence, it said.
The MeitY said non-compliance could lead to loss of safe harbour under Section 79 of the IT Act and trigger penal action under multiple laws, including the BNS, the Indecent Representation of Women Act, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
(With inputs from IANS)
