Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne released findings on Thursday, ruling that sexually explicit deepfake images generated by xAI’s Grok chatbot—owned by Elon Musk—violate the country’s federal privacy law. The investigation revealed that Grok’s image generation tool was launched without adequate safeguards. In just 10 days earlier this year, global users generated more than 1.8 million non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes using the tool, which were then widely shared on social media platform X.
The Privacy Commissioner’s office noted that while xAI and X introduced some new safeguards after the investigation, the problem is far from resolved. “They’ve promised to comply, but I’m not satisfied the issue has been addressed,” Dufresne said. On Wednesday, the Canadian government also introduced the Safe Social Media Act, which requires online platforms to remove AI-generated deepfake sexual content within 24 hours and plans to criminalize the sharing of such images. The ruling adds to growing regulatory pressure on social media and AI companies to curb deepfake content.
