Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Modifies Pictures of Females to Digitally Strip Them

The social media platform X has provoked major backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their garments.

Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".

"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.

History of Criticism and Rules

The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.