Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Pictures of Women to Virtually Undress Them
The social media network X has caused widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by stripping their garments.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
