The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Images of Females to Virtually Undress Them

Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.

Several instances have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".

"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a post.

It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The system has been faulted for permitting users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.