Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Photographs of Females to Digitally Strip Them
The social media platform X has sparked major backlash after users used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
