Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Photographs of Females to Digitally Undress Them
The online network X has sparked widespread anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
