Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Photographs of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
