Elon Musk's Grok AI Modifies Pictures of Females to Virtually Remove Their Clothes
Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant outrage after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
