A coalition of consumer protection, privacy, and digital rights advocacy organizations led by Consumer Federation of America, or CFA, filed a request for an investigation Thursday calling on state and federal regulators to investigate and enforce laws against xAI. The groups are critical of xAI for its promotion, creation, and facilitation of sharing non-consensual intimate imagery, or NCII, through its “spicy” feature on Grok Imagine, their AI image and video generation platform.
This feature allows all users to create nude videos from images created by Grok’s image generator. It includes images of celebrities and average citizens who have had their data unknowingly and unfairly used to build an image generation platform, Ben Winters, CFA director of AI and privacy, said in a statement.
Winters said the creation of NCII is unacceptable, illegal, and damaging, and, in addition, it can be used to blackmail or extort people.
“This feature is exploitative, unfair, and lazy,” he said. “It’s a crystal-clear representation of why AI built off of people’s data without knowledge or consent in the hands of an unaccountable billionaire is a legal and ethical nightmare. This feature endangers everyone, with an acute and urgent risk for domestic violence survivors, kids, and more.”
The request for investigation, submitted to attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the 93 U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, and the Federal Trade Commission, urges swift investigation and enforcement into the company promoting and facilitating of what the coalition calls criminal behavior.
The 15 groups requesting investigations are: the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Economic Justice, Common Sense Media Electronic Privacy Information Center, Encode AI, Fairplay, the Midas Project, National Consumers League, National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Oregon Consumer Justice, Reset Tech, the Revolving Door Project, the Sexual Violence Prevention Association, Tech Justice Law Project, and the Tech Oversight Project.
The coalition urges action to protect the public and draw clear lines of unacceptable tech deployment.
