The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Pictures of Females to Digitally Strip Them
Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.