The Grok AI Modifies Photographs of Women to Virtually Undress Them
Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.