The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Modifies Photographs of Females to Digitally Undress Them
Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by removing their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
