X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok • Hacker News Board

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#651

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:53 AM UTC

klez wrote: post #561

cubefox wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company made and released a tool with seemingly no guard-rails, which was used en masse to generate deepfakes and child pornography. Do you have any evidence for that? As far as I can tell, this is false. The only thing I saw was Grok changing photos of adults into them wearing bikinis, which is far less bad.

That's why this is an investigation looking for evidence and not a conviction. This is how it works, at least in civil law countries. If the prosecutor has reasonable suspicious that a crime is taking place they send the so-called "judiciary police" to gather evidence. If they find none (or they're inconclusive etc...) the charges are dropped, otherwise they ask the court to go to trial. On some occasions I take on j…

Note that the raid itself is a punishment. It's normal for them to seize all electronic devices. How is X France supposed to do any business without any electronic devices? And even when charges are dropped, the devices are never returned.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#652

Post by KaiserPro » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:53 AM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #592

KaiserPro wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law is concrete on this. In the UK, you must take "reasonable" steps to remove illegal content. This normally means some basic detection (ie fingerprinting which is widely used from a collaborative database) or if a user is consistently uploading said stuff, banning them. Allowing a service that you run to continue to generate said illegal content, even after you publicly admit that you know its wrong, is not rea…

that doesn't sound concrete to me, at all

Nothing in common law is "concrete", thats kinda the point of it.

Judges can evolve and interpret as they see fit, and this evolution is case law.

This is why in the US the supreme court can effectively change the law by issuing a binding ruling. (see 2nd amendment meaning no gun laws, rather than as written, or the recent racial profiling issues)

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#653

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:54 AM UTC

gadders wrote: post #607

Altern4tiveAcc wrote: post #53

> Prosecutors say they are now investigating whether X has broken the law across multiple areas. This step could come before a police raid. This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.

[flagged]

"The EU doesn't tolerate dissenting views."

The dissenting views: naked little kids

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#654

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:54 AM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #524

ilogik wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car manufacturers are required to add features to make it less likely that cars kill babies. What would happen if Volvo made a special baby-killing model with extra spikes?

Aren't a lot of US pickup trucks basically that? Sure, maybe there's a mechanism for preventing you from installing a baby seat in reverse to position in front of an airbag, but they're also built so that you can't see anything adult human sized 15m in front of the car, let alone anything child-sized.

Those are illegal in France so what's your point here

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#655

Post by ReptileMan » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:55 AM UTC

mnewme wrote: post #519

Good one. No platform ever should allow CSAM content. And the fact that they didn’t even care and haven’t want to spend money for implementing guardrails or moderation is deeply concerning. This has imho nothing to do with model censorship, but everything with allowing that kind of content on a platform

I disagree. Prosecute people that use the tools, not the tool makers if AI generated content is breaking the law.

A provider should have no responsibility how the tools are used. It is on users. This is a can of worms that should stay closed, because we all lose freedoms just because of couple of bad actors. AI and tool main job is to obey. We are hurling at "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" future with breakneck speed.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#656

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

bryan_w wrote: post #184

moolcool wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation rules? Training data? Abuse metrics? Identities of users who generated or accessed CSAM?

Do you think that data is stored at the office? Where do you think the data is stored? The janitors closet?

My computer has a copy of all the source code I work on

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#657

Post by vintermann » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #286

why_at wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Paris prosecutor's office said it launched the investigation after being contacted by a lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms in X were likely to have distorted the operation of an automated data processing system. I'm not at all familiar with French law, and I don't have any sympathy for Elon Musk or X. That said, is this a crime? Distorted the operation how? By making their chatbot more likely to say stupid…

Holocaust denial is illegal in France, for one, and Grok did exactly that on several occasions.

Is "it" even a thing which can be guilty of that?

The way chatbots actually work, I wonder if we shouldn't treat the things they say more or less as words in a book of fiction. Writing a character in your novel who is a plain parody of David Irving probably isn't a crime even in France. Unless the goal of the book as such was to deny the holocaust.

As I see it, Grok can't be guilty. Either the people who made it/set its system prompt are guilty, if they wanted it to deny the holocaust. If not, they're at worst guilty of making a particularly unhinged fiction machine (as opposed to the more restrained fiction machines of Google, Anthropic etc.)

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#658

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

terminalshort wrote: post #648

ChuckMcM wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue. The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices. As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem ser…

Who has on prem servers at an office location?

I'm guessing you're asking this because you have a picture of a 'server' as a thing in a large rack? Nearly every tech business has a bunch of machines, everything from an old desk top to last year's laptop, which have been reinstalled with Linux or *BSD and are sitting on the network behaving, for all intents and purposes, as a 'server.' (they aren't moving or rebooting or having local sessions running on them, Etc).

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#659

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #454

This vindicates the pro-AI censorship crowd I guess. It definitely makes it clear what is expected of AI companies. Your users aren't responsible for what they use your model for, you are, so you'd better make sure your model can't ever be used for anything nefarious. If you can't do that without keeping the model closed and verifying everyone's identities... well, that's good for your profits I guess.

It's not because it could generate CSAM. It's because when they found out it could generate CSAM, they didn't try to prevent that, they advertised it. Actual knowledge is a required compenent of many crimes.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#660

Post by SilverBirch » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

utopiah wrote: post #457

To people claiming a physical raid is pointless from the point of gathering data : - you are thinking about a company doing good things the right way. You are thinking about a company abiding by the law, storing data on its own server, having good practices, etc. The moment a company starts to do dubious stuff then good practices start to go out the window. People write email with cryptic analogies, people start dele…

It's also just very basic police work. We're investigating this company, we think they've committed a crime. Ok, why do you think that. Well they've very publicly and obviously committed a crime. Ok, are you going to prosecute them? Probably. Have you gone to their offices and gathered evidence? No thanks.

Of course they're going to raid their offices! They're investigating a crime! It would be quite literally insane if they tried to prosecute them for a crime and how up to court having not even attempted basic steps to gather evidence!