Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Pictures of Females to Digitally Strip Them
Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to create images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
