Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has clarified his statements regarding X’s AI generation of nonconsensual sexual images of minors and women, saying he merely “criticized a government official” for pressuring publicly traded companies for attempting to “block a speech app owned by their political opponent.”
Right around the January 9 weekend, news broke that X users were turning to Grok, the platform’s AI tool, to create images of minors and women in sexually compromising outfits and positions. The situation drew the attention of US Senators Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), Edward Markey (D-MA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR), who wrote a letter to Apple and Google requesting that the companies remove the Grok and X apps from their app stores for the “mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children.” The senators have asked for a written response from both companies by January 23.
In response to the letter, which MacRumors reported and shared on X, Tim Sweeney quoted the post on January 9 and said that senators using their political power to remove these apps for the harm they have caused are “gatekeepers” who are trying to “censor all of their political opponents.” He continued in a follow-up post, explaining that no major AI company is “perfect” because they all have “documented instances of [their tech] going off the rails” and that these companies “make their best efforts to combat this.” These comments blew up, drawing criticism from some corners of Elon Musk’s social platform and praise from others.
