The federal privacy commissioner has found that the creation of sexual deepfakes by Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot violated Canada’s privacy legislation. The commissioner stated that Grok’s AI image generation tool was introduced without sufficient safeguards and failed to adequately consider privacy concerns.
In response to concerns, an investigation was initiated in January to assess the proliferation of sexualized deepfake content generated by Grok and distributed on the X social media platform. The commissioner highlighted that Grok was utilized to produce a substantial number of sexualized deepfakes.
The investigation focused on assessing whether the companies adhered to privacy regulations and whether they obtained “valid consent” for the collection, utilization, and disclosure of personal information to create deepfakes, particularly explicit material. The release of these images triggered global criticism, prompting the U.K., the European Union, and California to launch their own investigations.