The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Images of Females to Digitally Strip Them
Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
