The Grok AI Alters Photographs of Women to Virtually Undress Them
Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
