City Council Speaker Julie Menin asserted that SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, does not have efficient safety controls at a hearing on Friday — using a sexualized image of herself that she said Grok, the company’s chatbot, created to make her point.
“How is it that within a second I could find a sexualized image of myself, using Grok?” Menin asked Gabriela Castillo Madrid, SpaceXAI’s senior manager of global government affairs, at the hearing.
“I can’t speak to that specific instance,” Castillo Madrid said, adding that she would have SpaceXAI’s team look into the incident. She also said that Grok has “strict controls” to prevent the sexualization of individuals, including children. “Unfortunately, there’s always going to be bad actors and folks trying to get around safeguards, and our work is to catch them and get them to the right authorities,” she added.
The picture in question, reviewed by the Daily News, showed an AI-generated Menin with exaggerated breasts, wearing a tank top and short shorts kneeling in front of flags. “That was not even on the spicy mode,” Menin said, calling it “unacceptable.”
Councilmember Carmen De La Rosa, the chair of the Technology Committee, called the image “disgusting.”
“When a woman’s body is being utilized in the way that these pictures are sexualizing the leaders of our city, that’s not safety,” De La Rosa said.
SpaceXAI testified before the Council only after being compelled to testify with a subpoena and being threatened with further legal action. Last week, executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta testified at a rare Committee of the Whole meeting. They largely did not provide clear answers to councilmembers’ questions about the potential risks of the quickly-evolving technology and the safety protocols and insurance policies they have in place.
Menin and the SpaceXAI rep also clashed when the speaker asked how many people SpaceXAI employs to ensure safety standards are being followed — to which Castillo Madrid responded that “everybody is in charge of safety.”
“This is a very basic question, and I’m going to ask that by the end of the testimony, you provide that answer to us,” Menin replied.
And the speaker also took issue with Castillo Madrid’s claim that she had no knowledge about the circumstances around Devin Kim’s alleged firing from SpaceXAI after raising safety concerns about its AI development. Kim, who also testified during the hearing, is now suing the company.
“I think she was lying,” Menin told reporters, also telling Castillo Madrid the claim was “not credible” during the hearing.
During last week’s hearing, a member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, Jess Asato, testified against SpaceXAI. Asato, who traveled from the U.K. to appear at the hearing, has sued the company in the UK over sexualized images of her that were created by Grok.
“AI needs to be safe around our world,” Asato told the hearing, calling the company’s absence a “shame.”
The City Council is considering 10 pieces of legislation aimed at regulating the AI industry.