Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Pictures of Women to Digitally Strip Them

The online network X has provoked widespread outrage after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their clothing.

Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.

Developer Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy fines".

"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

Background of Controversy and Rules

The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.

"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.