🔗 Share this article The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Alters Pictures of Women to Digitally Strip Them Elon Musk's online network X has sparked major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their attire. Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts. Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies". A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines". "The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences." Regulator Position and Platform Functionality The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images. Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post. It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature. Background of Controversy and Rules The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities. "The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added. XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion". In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI. It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.