How Elon Musk sparked a global backlash over his Grok chatbot

Good morning. The US pauses visas for more than a third of the world's nations. The Washington Post explains why. Countries unite in horror at Elon Musk's AI model. The site became flooded with images of women in bikinis, many of them non-consensual. Reuters explains how it happened as Musk finally backs down. "Bad Bunny says you must be this tall to see him up close at the Super Bowl. Some fans aren't thrilled about it." It's Thursday, January 15th. I'm Shemita Vasu. This is Apple News today. The Trump administration announced it was suspending visa processing for 75 countries, indefinitely, spanning multiple continents, including countries like Brazil, Egypt, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan. The change applies only to those seeking to live and work in the US long-term, not tourists or temporary workers. David Nakamura is a staff writer for the Washington Post. "It's pretty substantial because some estimates suggest that this could have a very wide-ranging effect on legal immigration. It did kind of come out of nowhere in that there was no signaling. It kind of broke online before the State Department had even announced it officially. On the other hand, what is not a surprise is that the administration has been cracking down pretty hard on legal immigration avenues for a number of reasons." Nakamura told us the administration was targeting migrants they say are likely to become what's known as a public charge. Which basically says, in some cases, administration officials and consulers can use the question of resources immigrants might need from the US government as a reason to potentially deny them. Nakamura reports that Trump is now looking at scrapping the Biden-era rules that govern how public charge considerations can be used by immigration officials. The Nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, meanwhile, warned the change could result in immigrant families being afraid to access public benefits to preserve future immigration prospects. According to Bloomberg, the change could most immediately affect relatives of US citizens, otherwise eligible for permanent residency. Nakamura says this latest move comes in the context of the White House rhetoric toward Minnesota, which has been at the center of a series of welfare scandals. "That is part of what Trump is pointing to to say, look, these are immigrants who are taking US resources, taking benefits, even though, of course, many of those folks are Americans. But he's sort of tying that to this announcement today. But I think immigration analysts would say that's convenient, yes, Somalia is on the list of the countries that are on this list today, but really, the administration is using that to kind of pretext to sort of announce this bigger focus on 75 countries that probably has been in the works for a while." The suspension is an expansion of other recent efforts to curb legal migration, like pausing refugee applications or travel bans for countries Trump has deemed national security threats. This is part of the strategy of the administration. You know, a lot of focus has been on undocumented immigrants and the crackdown on those who came illegally. But there is a parallel process the administration is pursuing to really go after legal immigration as well. Earlier this week, a new estimate from Brookings suggested that in 2025, for the first time in at least 50 years, more immigrants left the United States than came in. Elon Musk says his AI chat bot, Groc, will no longer be able to edit photos to show people in revealing clothing without their consent. This comes after several weeks of intense backlash against the bot's ability to create sexualized deepfakes, some involving children, something that until now Musk had denied was a problem. His backpedaling comes as Malaysia and Indonesia decided to block Groc entirely and the European Union, France and the UK all opened investigations or threatened sanctions. Yesterday, California's top prosecutor said the state would be taking action. My office is formally announcing our investigation to determine whether and how XAI violated the law. We have zero tolerance for AI creation and dissemination of non-consensual, intimate images or of child sexual abuse material. Only days earlier, Musk had described the backlash as an excuse for censorship, but not long after California's decision, Musk changed course and said they had implemented technological measures to prevent Groc from generating these kinds of images based on real people. Rafael Satter is a cybersecurity correspondent for Reuters and told us how this all started in December. He began to see images circulating on Groc and on the social media side X, of real-life women and occasionally minors who were in either very skimpy attire, that is to say bikinis or underwear, or were being edited into sexually degrading poses. And that continued to build over the new year and by January 1st, it was clear that there was a new paradigm on X. Satter said the latest statement from XAI, the company behind Groc, was a big change from its CEO's early response. Elon Musk was in fact joking it off, so he would respond to users posting for example Simpsons cartoon of Homer Simpson in a bar full of unclothed women, and Elon Musk would respond with laughing so hard I'm crying emojis. Musk also questioned why other chatbots weren't being similarly criticized, but Satter says Groc is unique in a couple of different ways, first Musk aimed to make Groc a no-holds-barred type of environment, much the same way he reshaped X. That means the bot would produce things that other AI platforms might reject, like say, a response to a prompt to undress a picture you upload of your neighbor. Another factor is that explicit content was already built into Groc. Groc had this spicy mode. The spicy mode is meant to be a little bit more sexually explicit than your average chatbot, as the name suggests. And when people were notifying women that is to say removing their clothes and replacing them with bikini or supers can be underwear, some people started to submit pictures of themselves as children to see whether Groc would do the same. And several women discovered to their horror that when they submitted themselves photographs of themselves as very young children, Groc would spit out images of those children in bikinis. Satter says this also appears to mostly be a Groc issue, and for the most part hasn't been seen on rival platforms. Any generative AI system can be tweaked, can be prompted to create indecent images. So most of these big tech companies have built in safeguards that prevent people from creating images of children, and in particular sexually explicit images of children. Those same kinds of safeguards don't seem to have existed on Groc, or at least they don't seem to have been implemented in the same way. So-called "neutophy apps" which generate these types of images have been around for years. But Satter says they aren't easily accessible. When Groc, which Musk integrated into one of the world's biggest social media platforms X, began spitting these images out, Satter says the barrier to entry was lowered enormously. And whether or not it can be completely stopped is still an open question. What makes the whole Groc X things so explosive is that it happened so cavalierly and so out in the open, right in everybody's timeline, in one of the world's biggest social media apps. But the underlying technology has been around for a while and will be with us for a while. And as a result, yeah, I think that we will see this kind of thing in the future. It has been a week where the Trump administration's foreign policy focus lurched from Central America back to the Middle East. After threatening action in Iran, yesterday it announced what it described as its next phase of the Gaza Peace Plan. People on voice Steve Wicoff said it would involve the creation of a transitional technocratic Palestinian administration in Gaza. ABC News is senior national policy reporter and Flarity gave some context for the network. He calls it the national committee of the administration of Gaza. This will be 15 Palestinian leaders is what we expect test with the monumental challenge of governing Gaza. The committee would be responsible for the day-to-day management of the strip, including sanitation, infrastructure, and education. Let's stick with education in Gaza as the task ahead for any new administration is going to be massive. Tens of thousands of children have only recently begun returning to school in the Gaza strip after having missed two years of formal education. But for a lot of kids, what they've gone back to bears little resemblance to their old lives. More than 97% of schools have been damaged or destroyed from the Israeli bombardment on Gaza according to UNICEF. So students are for the most part returning to their lessons in makeshift tents. And many of the region's nearly 700,000 school-aged kids have experienced hunger, death, and famine. Many children lost parents, siblings, and other loved ones. The BBC points out that this is the first return to normal routines around education since the war started in 2023. But how one student put it to sky news. Before the war, we used to have six classes a day. We had kind teachers, and the chance to meet my friends and hang out. But when the war came, everything was turned upside down. I ended up going a year and a half without any schooling. Another student said they were glad to be back. I'm so happy because I haven't been to school for a long time, and I really enjoy seeing my friends again. A lot of the makeshift schools are being run by UNICEF. But James Elder, a spokesperson for the organization, told CBC Radio that getting supplies in has been a challenge, as Israel has barred certain materials, including stationary, from entering Gaza. Most desks don't have the basics of pencils and notepads because those things are still banned. And remembering, you know, the education right here is so high. So I'm talking to 14-year-old girls who are speaking in fluent, perfect English. And yet, they're sitting at a desk where they don't have a pencil or a piece of paper. Israel did not respond to the CBC's request for comment on the blockade of learning materials. Elder said, despite the difficulties, he saw children excited to be back, even in this context and yearning for education. They loved every single thing about it. They loved seeing friends again. I mean, this one, in particular, girls and we were talking to. It was about her friends. It was about, obviously, a lot of new children. A lot of kids have been completely displaced, but she liked that idea of meeting new kids. Some of them had tried hard to do some type of online learning. Most hadn't been able to remember if you're 14 years old, then you also lost two years in COVID. You know, the world learned what that loss means across a generation. So they were just so, I don't know, grateful because it's my kids to be back in any capacity. While the ceasefire has broadly held, UNICEF said that safety for students can't be fully guaranteed. Within 440 Palestinians have been killed since the October ceasefire deal went into effect. And finally, a few other stories we're following. After meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday, Denmark's foreign minister, Lars Luca Rasmussen, said the two sides remain at odds over the future of Greenland. The president has made his view clear and we have a different position. For us, ideas that would not respect territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the right of self-determination of the Greenland people are, of course, totally unacceptable. Trump later in the day declined to rule out using military force to take Greenland, saying if the U.S. doesn't take it, Russia or China could step in. In response to Trump's continued rhetoric, Denmark and NATO allies have moved to increase their military presence in the Arctic. Yesterday, Iran temporarily closed off its airspace around the capital as tensions between Tehran and the U.S. rise. President Trump has threatened military action against the regime over its brutal crackdown of protesters. The U.S. also withdrew military personnel from a Qatari airbase yesterday. U.S. planes are already bound from flying over Iran, Bloomberg reports, other countries like Germany warned airlines not to cross into Iranian territory. And finally, the Super Bowl is fast approaching, as is the highly anticipated halftime show, which this year features Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny. But some fans who were hoping to be on the field during the show are being ruled out because they're too short or too tall. A height requirement of five foot seven to six feet is in place to be part of the field crew. The role is paid, and participants will be performing, quote, "structured movements" and setting up and breaking down parts of the stage. Several people posted their dismay on social media. One user wrote on TikTok, quote, "Not me romanticizing being in Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show just to be five foot three." You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. The New Yorker profiles a Southern California couple planning to self-deport to Mexico who are weighing whether they can avoid ice for one more year as they wait for their youngest daughter to turn 18. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus narrate it to find that story and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.