Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Photographs of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
The online platform X has provoked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
