NEW DELHI: Posing questions to Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok that lead to inflammatory responses may result in criminal action against the user as well as the platform, official sources have said, just as the Centre told X (formerly Twitter) – which has filed a lawsuit in the Karnataka high court challenging what it calls Indian govt’s unlawful content regulation and arbitrary censorship – that it needs to follow the law of the land on content takedown requests.
Even as the chatter started getting thicker over the use of abusive words and slang by Grok in its Hindi responses to user queries, X decided to challenge the central govt in court over the interpretation of the Information Technology Act, particularly its use of Section 79(3)(b), which the micro-blogging platform has alleged violates Supreme Court’s rulings and undermines free expression online.

The petition, scheduled for hearing on March 27, seeks a declaration to the effect that Section 79(3)(b) does not vest the govt with powers to issue an order to block information posted on X. X argues that such an order can only be issued under Section 69A of the IT Act, read with the IT Rules, 2009.