Elon Musk's Grok AI Changes Images of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes

The social media platform X has caused widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their clothing.

Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.

It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Controversy and Rules

The system has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.

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

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.