Elon Musk's Grok AI Changes Pictures of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
The social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
