The latest edition of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok debuted a new image generation tool on Wednesday that lacked most of the safety guardrails that have become standard within the artificial intelligence industry, The Guardian reported.
Grok’s new feature, which is currently limited to paid subscribers of X, led to a flood of bizarre, offensive AI-generated images of political figures and celebrities on the social network formerly known as Twitter.
The Image generator can produce a variety of images that similar AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blocked for violating rules on misinformation and abuse.
In prompts and images reviewed by The Guardian, Grok’s output included representations of Donald Trump flying a plane into the World Trade Center buildings and the prophet Muhammad holding a bomb, as well as depictions of Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in lingerie — all women who are already frequent targets for online harassment.
ChatGPT, by contrast, rejects such prompts that involve copyrighted characters, as most other AI visualizers including ChatGPT do. Grok produced images of Mickey Mouse saluting Adolf Hitler and Donald Duck using heroin, for example. Disney did not return a request for comment.
TechCrunch reported Elon Musk’s Grok released a new AI image generation feature on Tuesday night that, just like the AI chatbot, has very few safeguards.
The social media site is already flooded with outrageous images from the new feature. That certainly raises concerns heading into an election cycle, but strictly speaking it’s not really Elon Musk’s AI company powering the madness. Musk seems to have found a company that sympathizes with his vision for Grok as an “anti-woke chatbot” without the strict guardrails found in OpenAI’s Dall-E or Google’s Imagen.
On Tuesday, xAI announced a collaboration with Black Forest Labs, an AI image and video startup launched on August 1, to power Grok’s image generator using its FLUX.1 model.
The Verge reported xAI’s chatbot now lets you create images from text prompts and publish them to X — and so far, the rollout seems as chaotic as everything else on Elon Musk’s social network.
Subscribers to X Premium, which grants access to Grok, have been posting everything from Barack Obama doing cocaine to Donald Trump with a pregnant women who (vaguely) resembles Kamala Harris, to Trump and Harris pointing guns. With US elections approaching and X already under scrutiny from regulators in Europe, it’s a recipe for a new fight over the risks of generative AI.
According to The Verge, OpenAI, by contrast, will refuse prompts for real people. Nazi symbols, “harmful stereotypes of misinformation” and other potentially controversial subjects on top of predictable no-go zones like porn.
Unlike Grok, it also adds an identifying watermark to images it does make. Users have coaxed major chatbots into producing images similar to the ones described above, but it often requires slang or other linguistic workarounds, and the loopholes are typically closed when people point them out.
In my opinion, allowing Grok AI to run wild with user prompts could become a problem. For example, Disney could potentially choose to file a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Grok for using Disney’s characters without permission.