Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Pictures of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
The social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their clothing.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
