Elon Musk's Grok AI Modifies Images of Females to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
The online network X has sparked widespread anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
