California launched an investigation Wednesday into Elon Musk’s xAI after its Grok chatbot generated sexualized images of women and children, as European officials said they were assessing corrective measures promised by the company.The probe comes after Indonesia and Malaysia blocked access to Grok entirely, while Britain’s media regulator launched its own investigation after users created lewd images using simple text prompts.”The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.”I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further. We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material.”Bonta said the investigation would determine whether and how xAI violated state law after the explicit imagery was “used to harass people across the internet.”Grok’s so-called “Spicy Mode” feature allowed users to create sexualized deepfakes of women and children using prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes.”There was no immediate response from xAI about Grok, which is integrated into Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter.But the European Commission, which acts as the EU’s digital watchdog, said it had taken note of “additional measures X is taking to ban Grok from generating sexualised images of women and children.””We will carefully assess these changes to make sure they effectively protect citizens in the EU,” EU Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said in a statement.- ‘Not a solution’ -Regnier did not specify what measures had been promised by the company.When AFP asked the chatbot if xAI had banned the creation of sexualized deepfakes, Grok said: “xAI has imposed restrictions on Grok’s generation of sexualized deepfakes following global backlash and investigations, but no full ban has been announced.””Spicy Mode appears partially functional, though limited in some regions,” it added.Last week, Grok appeared to deflect the criticism with a new monetization policy, announcing on X that image generation and editing were now “limited to paying subscribers.”But that announcement only fueled further outrage, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office condemning the move as an affront to victims and “not a solution” and the EU calling for a complete halt to the generation of such content.Indonesia on Saturday became the first country to block access to Grok entirely, with neighboring Malaysia following on Sunday.India said Sunday that X had removed thousands of posts and hundreds of user accounts in response to its complaints.Britain’s Ofcom media regulator said Monday it was opening a probe into whether X failed to comply with UK law over the sexual images.And France’s commissioner for children Sarah El Hairy said Tuesday she had referred Grok’s generated images to French prosecutors, the Arcom media regulator and the European Union.The European Commission, which acts as the EU’s digital watchdog, has ordered X to retain all internal documents and data related to Grok until the end of 2026 in response to the uproar.Last week, an analysis of more than 20,000 Grok-generated images by Paris non-profit AI Forensics found that more than half depicted “individuals in minimal attire” — most of them women, and two percent appearing to be under-18s.

Four crewmembers aboard the International Space Station were set to depart Wednesday after a medical issue prompted their mission to be cut a month short — a first for the orbiting laboratory.American astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui were set to undock from the ISS at 2205 GMT on Wednesday, after five months in space.NASA has declined to disclose which crewmember has the health problem or give details about the issue, but the US space agency has stressed the return is not an emergency situation, saying the person’s condition was stable.The four are scheduled to splash down off the California coast at around 0840 GMT on Thursday aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule.”First and foremost, we are all OK. Everyone on board is stable, safe, and well cared for,” Fincke, the pilot of SpaceX Crew-11, said in a social media post.”This was a deliberate decision to allow the right medical evaluations to happen on the ground, where the full range of diagnostic capability exists. It’s the right call, even if it’s a bit bittersweet.”James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, said “lingering risk” and a “lingering question as to what that diagnosis is” led to the decision to bring back the crew earlier than originally scheduled.The four members of Crew-11 arrived at the ISS in early August and had been scheduled to stay onboard the space station until they were rotated out in mid-February with the arrival of the next crew.American astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, who arrived at the station in November aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, will remain on the ISS.The Russian Roscosmos space agency operates alongside NASA on the space station, and the two agencies take turns transporting a citizen of the other country to and from the orbiter — one of the few areas of bilateral cooperation that still endure between the United States and Russia.- Ready for the unexpected – Continuously inhabited since 2000, the International Space Station seeks to showcase multinational cooperation, bringing together Europe, Japan, the United States, and Russia.Located some 400 kilometers (248.5 miles) above Earth, the ISS functions as a testbed for research that supports deeper space exploration — including eventual missions to return humans to the Moon and onward to Mars.The four astronauts being evacuated had been trained to handle unexpected medical situations, said Amit Kshatriya, a senior NASA official, praising how they have dealt with the situation.The ISS is set to be decommissioned after 2030, with its orbit gradually lowered until it breaks up in the atmosphere over a remote part of the Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, a spacecraft graveyard.