Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Pictures of Women to Virtually Undress Them

The social media network X has provoked widespread outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.

Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.

"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.