BERLIN, Jan 9 (Reuters) – Germany’s Ministry of Justice plans to propose measures in the near future that would enable authorities to more effectively combat the use of artificial intelligence to manipulate images in a way that violates individuals’ rights, a spokesman said on Friday.
Grok, the built-in AI chatbot on billionaire Elon Musk’s social media site
A Reuters investigation found that chatbot image generation was used to create images of women and children wearing minimalist clothing, often without the consent of the individuals depicted.
Germany’s media minister earlier this week urged the European Commission to take legal action to stop what he called the “industrialization of sexual harassment” on X.
Responding to a question about the dispute at a regularly scheduled government press conference, Ministry of Justice spokesperson Anna-Lena Beckfeld said Germany was preparing to hear the issue in domestic courts.
“It is unacceptable that large-scale manipulation is used to systematically violate individual rights,” she said. “We therefore want to ensure that criminal law is used more effectively to combat this behaviour.”
She told reporters the ministry was working to better regulate deepfakes and planned to develop a law to combat digital violence to support victims.
“We want to make it easier for them to take direct action against violations of their rights on the Internet,” Bakerfield said.
The ministry plans to make concrete proposals in the near future, she said, adding that she could not comment in detail on the plans at this time.
After initially allaying concerns about Grok image generation, xAI is now limiting the feature to paying subscribers. Musk said last week that anyone using chatbots to create illegal content would face the same consequences as uploading such material directly.
(Reporting by Andreas Rinke and Miranda Murray; Editing by Joe Bavier)
