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LAST UPDATE | 14 Jan
GARDAÍ ARE CURRENTLY investigating 200 reports about suspected child sexual abuse material linked to Grok.
Detective Chief Superintendent Barry Walsh of the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau told the Oireachtas Media Committee this afternoon that the material is either child sexual abuse content or content “indicative” of such abuse, and confirmed it is all now under active investigation.
When asked if the 200 images under investigation were all from Grok, Walsh confirmed that they were.
“That’s the status as of this morning,” Walsh said.
Asked by Fianna Fáil TD Peter ‘Chap’ Cleere if this figure was a “significant increase” on previous years, Walsh warned of a sharp and sustained rise in referrals of child sexual abuse material to gardaí.
He told TDs that cases have increased year-on-year, with around 25,500 referrals requiring assessment last year.
This is almost double the figure recorded in 2024, Walsh said, when approximately 13,300 reports were received by gardaí.
Grok, an AI tool embedded in the social media platform X, has come under fire in recent days over reports users can create sexual abuse images, including of children.
At the end of December, it rolled out an “edit image” button that allowed users to alter any image on X.
Within days, the platform was flooded with requests from people asking Grok to partially or completely remove clothing from women and underage girls.
The bot could not tell when a request is being made to digitally alter an image of a child, which has prompted accusations that Grok was being used for generating and disseminating child sexual abuse images.
The European Commission has said it is “very seriously looking” into complaints about the tool in what is the latest controversy surrounding the use of AI to create non-consensual sexual images of women and children.
Three major social media platforms have confirmed they will attend the next media committee meeting on 4 February, according to committee chairperson Alan Kelly.
During the meeting, Kelly pressed gardaí and others in attendance on a “gap in legislation” in relation to the prosecution of platforms providing services which generate sexual abuse imagery.
Superintendent Walsh told the committee that he was “not aware of any prosecutions of any vessel that facilitate that type of activity.”
“Where we’ve gotten in relation to social media, I’m scared,” Kelly said.
“Would you a license a social media company to come into your country and operate in the way that Twitter/X/Grok is operating on? You wouldn’t,” Kelly added.
Senator Ronan Mullen said that the committee was not grasping the need for legislation on the issue, asking “if we don’t criminalise the production and distribution…of deepfake materials designed to denigrate…then we’re going to constantly play a game of cat and mouse”.
Earlier, Fianna Fáil TD Malcolm Byrne and Social Democrats TD Sinéad Gibney were among several committee members to ask gardaí about circumstances where AI-generated adult material was being created, and how it broke the law.
Michael Mullen, Garda Detective Superintendent, said images reported to them were treated the same whether they were AI-generated or not.
“AI’s treated exactly the same as a real image,” Mullen said.
In a post on X this afternoon, the platform’s owner Elon Musk claimed that he was not aware of “any naked underage images generated by Grok”.
“Literally zero,” Musk said, adding that Grok “does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests.”
“When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state,” Musk said.
Musk had initially claimed the threats were part of an effort to censor X.
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