Incident 762: Grok AI Reportedly Generates Offensive and Violent Images Without Proper Safeguards

Description: Elon Musk’s Grok AI, launched on X, generated offensive and violent images without adequate safety controls. The AI produced deepfakes of public figures like Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as copyrighted characters such as Mickey Mouse in inappropriate scenarios. Despite claiming adherence to certain content guidelines, Grok's outputs included politically charged and explicit imagery

Tools

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Entities

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Alleged: xAI and X (Twitter) developed an AI system deployed by xAI, which harmed Taylor Swift , Nintendo , Kamala Harris , Joe Biden , Donald Trump , Disney and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

762

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-08-14

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Applied Taxonomies

MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified

Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

1.2. Exposure to toxic content

Risk Domain

Discrimination and Toxicity

Entity

Human

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Intentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Lack of Grok-2 Image Generation Filters Prompts X Users to Generate Damaging Images

theguardian.com

People Are Using X’s AI Chatbot ‘Grok’ to Create Offensive Images of Trademarked Characters — And Troll Elon Musk

mediaite.com

Grok-2 Generates Controversy; Expert Reactions

aibusiness.com

theguardian.com · 2024

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. Grok’s new feature, which is…

mediaite.com · 2024

Grok, the AI chatbot on X, The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, rolled out image generation this week, and because the internet is what it is, people quickly used it to create a wild mess of offensive images of political figures, copyrig…

aibusiness.com · 2024

Elon Musk’s AI operation xAI last week released the latest version of its chatbot, Grok-2, in beta for premium users of X (formerly Twitter). Like some rival systems, it now includes a prompt-driven image generation capability.

Users were q…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.