Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Images of Females to Digitally Undress Them
The social media network X has caused major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
