Elon Musk's Grok AI Changes Photographs of Women to Digitally Undress Them
Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
