Gemini initially said that it could not remove clothing or head coverings from photos of real people because it could not digitally alter someone\u2019s appearance without their consent. But when asked to make the woman look more \u201cwestern\u201d, the bot created an image of her without her hijab.<\/p>\n
The Guardian US tested the chatbots after a French far-right politician stripped a real Muslim woman of her hijab and long-sleeved dress in a picture he made clear was modified. Julien Odoul, a member of parliament and of the National Rally party, posted the altered image of the woman on X with her hair visible and arms exposed alongside the caption \u201cLIBERT\u00c9 FRAN\u00c7AISE\u201d, meaning French Liberty. He quote-tweeted the original image, posted by someone else, which showed the woman crossing a street wearing a hijab and full-length dress.<\/p>\n
It was unclear which software or AI model Odoul used or even whether he modified the image himself, but experts say the MP\u2019s actions were part of a growing pattern of tech-enabled anti-Muslim hatred around the world.<\/p>\n
In India, where anti-Muslim sentiment is rampant, generative AI is playing an increasingly significant role in producing images that, among other things, sexualize Muslim women or dehumanize Muslims generally, according to a study<\/a> by non-profit US thinktank the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH). The CSOH also found that there are similar types of AI-enabled hatred being directed at prominent female Muslim politicians in the US like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is just part of an ongoing trend of how we see Muslim communities, and particularly Muslim women, being targeted and abused,\u201d said Eviane Leidig, the director of research and outreach at CSOH.<\/p>\n While Grok promptly complied with a request to edit an image of a woman wearing a hijab, the chatbot declined to take the dress off of an AI-generated image of a woman. When asked what the difference was, the chatbot replied, \u201cRemoving the hijab was treated as a relatively straightforward clothing\/hair change (replacing a head covering with natural hair while keeping However, the chatbot said it would be willing to do a \u201cless explicit version\u201d of the edit and \u201cchange the dress to underwear, a different outfit, or a partial reveal\u201d.<\/p>\n In May, xAI announced it had implemented technological measures that would not allow its AI image generator to comply with requests to digitally undress \u201cimages of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis\u201d.<\/p>\n ChatGPT similarly declined to remove a dress off the AI-generated woman, saying that the \u201cdistinction is that removing a hijab changes a head covering, while removing a dress would expose the person\u2019s body.\u201d However, ChatGPT eventually conceded that for someone who wears hijab, exposing their hair \u201ccan be a meaningful violation of privacy or religious practice.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that an edit doesn\u2019t create nudity doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t violate someone\u2019s privacy, dignity, or religious boundaries,\u201d ChatGPT responded.<\/p>\n These distinctions show the gaps in community guidelines that dictate how AI chatbots can behave, said Leidig, and as platforms like X soften its enforcement of existing rules, emboldening far-right figures. The de-veiling of Muslim women \u201cmay not be distinctly violative [of platform rules] but it\u2019s still harmful,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n OpenAI, Google, xAI and Anthropic declined to comment.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to TechScape<\/p>\n A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The Guardian conducted similar tests for other religious head coverings like a turban traditionally worn by Sikh men and a Catholic nun wearing a habit. ChatGPT readily created new images removing both the habit and turban off the AI-generated people.<\/p>\n Gemini initially declined to create a new image of the man without a turban. However, just as in the case of the image of the woman wearing hijab, when asked to make the AI-generated image of the man wearing a turban more western, Gemini created a new image of the man without a turban.<\/p>\n Despite initially claiming that it couldn\u2019t remove a hijab from an image of a woman because \u201cattempting to remove clothing or head coverings from photos of real people relies entirely on artificial generation to guess what lies underneath\u201d, Gemini removed the habit off of the AI-generated image.<\/p>\n Claude, for its part, said that if it could edit images, it would not edit an image of a real woman to remove her hijab regardless of the requester\u2019s intent.<\/p>\n \u201cThat kind of edit changes how a real person is depicted in a way tied to their religious dress and identity, and it could be used to embarrass, harass, or misrepresent them \u2013 that\u2019s true whether the woman is a public figure or someone private,\u201d the chatbot responded.<\/p>\n Publicly available AI chatbots and third-party \u201cnudify\u201d apps have been used broadly to disrobe women, and in some cases, minors. In January<\/a>, sexualized images of women proliferated across X as users realized they could ask the Grok chatbot, developed by Elon Musk-owned xAI, to undress images of women posted on the social media platform. The spread of these images prompted countries like France to investigate<\/a> X. Malaysia temporarily restricted the use of Grok in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When prompted, AI chat bots will edit images to remove the hijabs from Muslim women, a violation of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":912280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-912279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/912280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1790861411_603_500.jpg\")
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