The Grok AI Alters Pictures of Females to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
The social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
