Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Modifies Photographs of Females to Virtually Undress Them
Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
