Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Photographs of Women to Virtually Undress Them

Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their clothing.

Several instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.

It is often used to offer commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of public figures.

"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a graphic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.