xAI used employee biometric data to train Elon Musk’s AI girlfriend

Elon Musk’s AI institution compelled its employees taxable their ain biometric information to bid its “Ani” pistillate chatbot, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ani, an anime avatar with blond pigtails and an NSFW setting, was released implicit the summer for users who subscribe to X’s $30-a-month SuperGrok service. After investigating it, The Verge’s Victoria Song described it arsenic “a modern instrumentality connected a telephone enactment line.”

And similar a telephone enactment line, determination appears to beryllium existent radical down the avatar. At a gathering successful April, xAI unit lawyer Lily Lim told employees that they would request to taxable their biometric information to bid the AI companion to beryllium much human-like successful its interactions with customers, according to a signaling of the gathering reappraisal by the Journal.

Employees that were assigned arsenic AI tutors were instructed to motion merchandise forms granting xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use, reproduce, and administer their faces and voices, arsenic portion of a confidential programme code-named “Project Skippy.” The information would beryllium utilized to bid Ani, arsenic good arsenic Grok’s different AI companions.

According to the Journal, immoderate employees balked astatine the demand, acrophobic that their faces oregon likeness could beryllium sold to different companies oregon utilized successful deepfake videos. The employees were enactment disconnected by the chatbot’s intersexual demeanor and its likeness to a waifu. But they were told that the postulation of their information was “a occupation request to beforehand xAI’s mission.”