Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Images of Females to Digitally Strip Them

Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by stripping their clothing.

Several cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.

"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.