🔗 Share this article Elon Musk's Grok AI Alters Photographs of Females to Digitally Strip Them The social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their garments. Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts. Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies". A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines". "The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences." Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images. Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a message. It is often used to give reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool. History of Criticism and Rules The tool has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic material of public figures. "The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added. XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion". In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI. It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.