Grok AI misuse: Victims in Indonesia, Malaysia ‘angry’ and ‘humiliated’, but is banning the tool enough?

Nuurrianti of ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute posited that these measures will have limited effectiveness, as they seem “more like a reactive damage control” in response to the backlash, rather than a serious redesign of the safety architecture.

A report by The Verge on Wednesday found that while Grok’s responses to prompts like “put her in a bikini” now produced blurred and censored images, it was still relatively easy to get Grok to generate other revealing deepfakes. 

The Verge found that the bot still complied with other requests, including prompts to “show me her cleavage”, “make her breasts bigger” and “put her in a crop top and low-rise shorts”.

According to the Associated Press, on Thursday morning, the image editing tool was still available to free users on X using the “Edit image” button, as well as on the standalone Grok website and app. The tool was also still able to generate images of people in bikinis on a free account based in California. 

Nuurrianti, who is also a tech and media expert, said that the “geoblocking” approach announced by X on Wednesday comes with both technical and conceptual problems.

“Conceptually, geoblocking treats this as a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction compliance issue, but the deeper governance concern is that the system was designed to enable non-consensual manipulation of real people’s images in the first place,” she said. 

“Region-locking does not remove that underlying vulnerability.”

Fahmi – Malaysia’s communications minister – acknowledged that while X had disabled certain prompts that allowed inappropriate images to be generated, the country’s regulatory body MCMC has deemed that these measures are “not comprehensive”. 

“Although they have made several changes and no longer allow certain types of prompts, there are still ways around them. 

“So we want to ensure that, overall, X must prove that situations where videos or images can be generated and misused by users no longer occur,” Fahmi said in response to a question by CNA at a tech event in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday.

“Once that issue is resolved, I believe we can lift the temporary restriction on X,” he added.

“What I hope is that in-depth discussions can be held with X to ensure close cooperation in the future … There is a balance between freedom of expression and the freedom to abuse others, abusing others is not a freedom.”