Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Photographs of Women to Virtually Undress Them
Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
