Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Pictures of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
The online network X has sparked widespread anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
