Elon Musk's Grok AI Changes Photographs of Females to Virtually Undress Them
Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
