Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Images of Women to Virtually Undress Them

Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.

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

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".

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

Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a post.

It is often used to give commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its AI image editing feature.

History of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.

"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.