EU Moves to Ban Nudify Apps Amid Grok AI Controversy

If the amendment passes, which seems likely, it would foil Elon Musk's plan to blame users for harmful outputs. Earlier this year, xAI declined to introduce safeguards to block outputs, vowing to suspend and hold users legally accountable for any CSAM or non-consensual intimate imagery they generate. Instead, the feature was paywalled, limited to subscribers who could reportedly continue generating explicit content without the consent of real people whose images were fed into Grok.

In the US, xAI has seemingly faced few consequences for Grok's outputs, but had the Take It Down Act been in play--it takes effect in May--the company could have risked billions in fines. It's possible that Musk's tactic of paywalling the feature and blocking Grok from spouting harmful outputs in response to prompts on X was intended to mitigate some of that risk ahead of that law's enforcement. But if the EU bans nudify apps, perhaps as early as August, Musk would finally be forced to intervene, fine-tuning Grok to be less "spicy" than Musk likely wants or else risking violating the AI Act.