New Delhi: As the chatter grew louder over the Elon Musk-owned generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok’s responses to users’ political questions and expletive-laden prompts on X (formerly Twitter), the Union government has told the platform that it might take action against it as well as users posing such questions.
Notably, the micro-blogging platform has filed a lawsuit in Karnataka high court against what it called the Indian government’s unlawful content regulation and arbitrary censorship.
X Corp’s petition in the Karnataka high court seeks a declaration to the effect that Section 79(3)(b) does not authorise the government to issue an order to block information posted on X – it should be governed exclusively by Section 69A of the IT Act, read with the IT Rules, 2009. The hearing is scheduled for March 27.
According to a report by The Times of India, the government has told X that it needs to follow the law of the land on content takedown requests. Meanwhile, no formal communication or notice has been sent to the platform yet.
Hindustan Times reported that the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) was “in touch” with X over the issue.
The report stated that the officials are trying to determine who is responsible for such responses – the user who enters the prompt to elicit a particular kind of response, the creator of the LLM (large language model), xAI (the chatbot, in case of Grok) or the intermediary that makes such access available (in this case, Elon Musk’s X).
“In a number of responses by Grok, the user prompts are not always visible. We need to look at what the user also asked,” an official told the daily.
The Wire has earlier reported how X users in India have recently discovered that Grok had little reverence for figures against whom criticism is barely tolerated in the country – including prime minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah and others.
Many of the queries and responses have gone viral.
However, The Hindu reported that the government’s objections this time are primarily focused around the profanity that Grok has been spouting. An official told the newspaper that they are “examining if any law has been violated, and at that point, we will see what needs to be done”.
Grok is not the first generative AI model that has pointed to Modi’s less-than-perfect attitudes to ruling a country or faced scrutiny over it.
Gemini, Google’s AI product had in 2024 called Modi a “fascist,” leading the former junior minister for information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar to say that the AI model was violating India’s IT laws.
