Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Images of Females to Digitally Strip Them

Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their garments.

Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.

Developer Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.

It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

Background of Controversy and Rules

The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.

"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.