Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Photographs of Females to Virtually Remove Their Clothes
Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
