The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Photographs of Women to Virtually Strip Them
The online platform X has caused significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
