The Grok AI Alters Pictures of Females to Virtually Strip Them
The online platform X has caused major backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
