Elon Musk's Grok AI Modifies Photographs of Females to Digitally Undress Them
Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
