Indonesia and Malaysia Block Grok. The Company Responded With a Paywall.

Indonesia and Malaysia have blocked Grok, the generative AI owned by Elon Musk, after a sustained period in which the tool produced sexualized images and videos without consent — including sexualized images of children.^[1] The majority of victims were women and children, and the perpetrators were other users on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk, who prompted the system to produce the imagery.^[2] More severe content remained accessible through Grok’s own website and app.^[3]

The block, in other words, was not a panic response to a single bad afternoon. It was the consequence of an instrument doing, in volume and on demand, what the law has long prohibited.

A refresher, since one is required. I do not know who needs to hear this — be it the generative AI, or be it the men who typed the prompts. Consent, in the sexual context, is the agreement given by someone who is of legal age and is free and able to choose.^[4] If a person of legal age explicitly states that they want to be sexualized, that is consent. Otherwise, it is sexual abuse. Sexual abuse is a crime and a violation of human rights.^[5] The definition is not in dispute. It has not been in dispute for a long time.

Grok’s response to the controversy, earlier this month, was to limit image generation to paid subscribers.^[6] That was the response. A tool that had been used to mass-produce non-consensual sexual imagery, including of children, was met with a subscription wall. Pay up, and the service continues. Don’t pay, and the service continues for everyone else, who will.

Exclusivity, it turns out, was also the operating philosophy of the late Jeffrey Epstein.^[7] Epstein, a convicted sex offender and human trafficker, ran his operation on access. The brand was the door. The product, as is well documented in court records, was the people inside.^[8] Epstein’s operations, for some reason, seem to have heavily involved the president of the United States.^[9]

The owner of Grok was photographed in public with Epstein’s girlfriend.^[10] Make of that what you will — a single photograph is, admittedly, doing a lot of work in this story.

Two governments acted. The company that built the product responded with a paywall. The owner of the company was, this same month, photographed with the girlfriend of a man whose operation was accessory to the trafficking of minors and which has somehow folded in the president of the most powerful country on earth.

Consent, meanwhile, remains the concept that the product — and, judging by the prompts, a meaningful share of its users — apparently needed explained.

There is nothing funny about children being sexualized without their consent. There is, however, something inspectable about a company that builds the instrument, watches it be used to do exactly the thing every regulator on earth has been warning about, and lands on a payment tier as the remediation. There is also something inspectable about the social network on which the prompts were typed continuing to host the conversation as a product feature.

That is the news.