The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Photographs of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes

Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.

Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.

Company Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.

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

History of Criticism and Policy

The system has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of public figures.

"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of people in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.