Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Pictures of Women to Virtually Remove Their Clothes

The social media platform X has caused major outrage after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by stripping their garments.

Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".

"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.

It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.

History of Criticism and Rules

The system has been condemned for permitting users to create images and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.

"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of people in a graphic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images made with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.