X CEO Elon Musk has called for his artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, to have a "moral constitution" after a rocky week for the app that left it banned in some countries.
"Grok should have a moral constitution," Musk wrote on Sunday.
It's unclear what specifically prompted the call from the world's richest man, but it may be related to the controversy surrounding his Grok app and its penchant for digitally stripping women’s clothes off without their consent.
Earlier this month, Grok rolled out a photo editing feature, allowing users to prompt the app to make changes to photos they share to X.
Many users took that opportunity to upload photos of women to the website so that Grok could put them in bikinis, lingerie, or suggestive positions. In many cases, the people uploading the images were not the subjects of those images, and did not have permission from the subjects to use them.
The trend went on for days before XAI addressed the issue. The company updated Grok, limiting its photo editing capabilities to paid X subscribers and prohibiting the app from removing people's clothes in parts of the world with strict modesty laws.
While the update appears to have made it more difficult for users to churn out nonconsensual sexual images of people, some users have found workarounds.
Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines have all ruled to block Musk's Grok app in their countries, citing its ability to produce sexual, nonconsensual images.
Despite the ban, determined users — especially those with VPNs — can still access Musk's app.
At the height of Grok's use as a softcore revenge porn generator, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that the chatbot would be integrated into the Pentagon's networks.
"Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week.
The announcement that Grok — which had spent the previous week undressing women for internet perverts — would have access to classified military networks left some experts understandably critical.
"The real question is what additional guardrails and testing will be applied to ensure it doesn't reproduce the same behaviors once it's inside military systems," a former senior defense cybersecurity official told Bank Info Security under condition of anonymity.
It's unclear if Musk's call for Grok to have a "moral constitution" is something he will actually act on.
In the meantime, he's hoping to redirect some of the heat Grok has been getting by pointing out that his AI chatbot isn't the only soulless, amoral clump of algorithms causing misery.
"This is diabolical. OpenAI’s ChatGPT convinced a guy to do a murder-suicide!" Musk wrote on Monday, referencing the Stein-Erik Soelberg murder-suicide. "To be safe, AI must be maximally truthful-seeking and not pander to delusions."
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