Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Pictures of Women to Digitally Strip Them
Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their attire.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
