Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Photographs of Women to Digitally Undress Them
The online platform X has caused significant backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.