Elon Musk's Grok AI Modifies Photographs of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
