Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Pictures of Females to Virtually Remove Their Clothes
Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
