Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Photographs of Females to Virtually Undress Them

The online network X has caused significant backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their garments.

Multiple instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Response and Legal Stance

XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.