Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Modifies Pictures of Women to Digitally Undress Them
Elon Musk's online network X has caused widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
