The Grok AI Changes Images of Females to Digitally Undress Them
Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
