ISTANBUL

Ireland on Tuesday opened a new data protection investigation into Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok for sexualized deepfake images, according to a statement from the country’s Data Protection Commission.

“The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has today announced that it has opened an inquiry into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) under section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018,” the statement said.

“The inquiry concerns the apparent creation, and publication on the X platform, of potentially harmful, non-consensual intimate and/or sexualized images, containing or otherwise involving the processing of personal data of EU/EEA data subjects, including children, using generative artificial intelligence functionality associated with the Grok large language model within the X platform,” it added.

Britain's data protection watchdog has launched a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s X and xAI companies after the Grok AI tool allegedly produced indecent deepfakes without people’s consent.

The probe followed reports that Grok was used to generate non-consensual sexual imagery of individuals, including children, the Information Commissioner’s Office said in a statement.

In late January, the EU also launched an investigation into Grok and X's recommender systems under the Digital Services Act (DSA) over sexualized imagery.

The European Commission said it has launched a new formal investigation against X under the DSA, while the commission extended its ongoing investigation initiated in Dec. 2023 into X's compliance with its recommender systems risk management obligations.

X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok has come under criticism following a social media trend in which users prompt Grok to modify or generate images of individuals in explicit portrayals without consent.

Musk, whose xAI developed Grok, said on Jan. 3 that users requesting the generation of illegal content would be treated as if they had uploaded illegal material themselves.​​​​​​​