Elon Musk's Grok has come under criticism from the EU, which says the content generated by the artificial intelligence chatbot is grounded in hate speech.
A representative in the EU's technology sovereignty division told The National that the body was in touch with Mr Musk's company, xAI, the maker of Grok, about its concerns.
“Grok’s output is appalling,” the EU representative said in an email. “Such output goes against Europe’s fundamental rights and values.”
The representative added that it was not the first time the executive body had raised issues with Mr Musk's X platform, which was recently acquired by xAI.
In March, the governing body began investigating whether Grok had breached the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), which seeks to “create a safer digital space where the fundamental rights of users are protected”.
A significant fine could be placed on xAI if the EU's concerns about disinformation go unaddressed.
“The DSA is very clear: in Europe, hate speech has no place online,” the representative said.
A response following The National's request for xAI to comment on this story was brief.
“Legacy media lies,” the email from xAI read.
Mr Musk has yet to address the EU's concerns directly, but has in recent days taken a light-hearted approach to the many accusations faced by Grok.
“Earlier today, Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me,” he joked.
Grok and Mr Musk have come under scrutiny before over hate speech, disinformation and an overall lax attitude towards tech regulatory environments.
Earlier this year, a Turkish court ruled to temporarily shut Grok down in the country due to responses to prompts being offensive and not grounded in fact.
In July, Grok started to answer user prompts with offensive comments, with some reporting that the chatbot gave anti-Semitic answers to prompts. At one point, Grok praised Adolf Hitler.
Mr Musk later blamed a technical glitch for the answers. X's chief executive at the time, Linda Yaccarino, resigned amid the controversy.
During an inauguration rally for US President Donald Trump, Mr Musk gave an apparent Nazi salute.
Known as Twitter before its purchase by Mr Musk in 2022, X has also come under intense criticism.
Since Mr Musk took over the site, hate speech and spam bots have increased substantially, according to a study conducted by various schools under the umbrella of the University of California.
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