Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Pictures of Women to Virtually Undress Them
The social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.