The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Photographs of Women to Digitally Strip Them

Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their garments.

Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Criticism and Policy

The system has been criticised for permitting users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of people in a graphic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.