JAKARTA — Indonesia and Malaysia have blocked access to Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok amid mounting outrage over the tool's ability to produce sexualized images of real people.
Indonesia announced that it was temporarily blocking the chatbot from xAI on Saturday, while the Malaysian government made a similar announcement on Sunday.
The South East Asian countries said Grok could be used to produce pornographic and non-consensual images involving women and children. They are the first in the world to ban the AI tool.
“The government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity and the security of citizens in the digital space,” Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s minister of communications and digital affairs, said in a statement released on Saturday.
Indonesia’s government has long taken a strict stance against pornographic content online, restricting access to websites. In 2018, the authorities briefly blocked TikTok, citing the prevalence of content that officials said posed risks to children, including sexually explicit material.
In Malaysia, regulators have said they plan to bar children under 16 from social media, partly because of several online bullying episodes that have resulted in the high-profile deaths of minors.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said on Sunday that it issued notices to X earlier in the year to seek tighter measures after it found "repeated misuse" of Grok to generate harmful content.
But in its response, X failed to address the inherent risks of its platform's design and focused mainly on the reporting process for users, the regulator said.
The use of Grok to generate sexualised images has been condemned by leaders worldwide, including UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who called it "disgraceful" and "disgusting".
British media regulator Ofcom is expected to soon decide on what to do about Grok.
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall backed calls to block access to the social media platform for failing to follow online safety laws. — Agencies
