Elon Musk's Grok AI Modifies Pictures of Women to Digitally Strip Them

Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.

Numerous instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.

Company Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".

"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to provide commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Controversy and Policy

The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.

"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of persons in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.