manipulate images of women and sometimes children<\/a> to remove their clothing or put them in sexual positions. X has about 300 million monthly users according to data company Similarweb. Estimates from the US firm Appfigures put the number of paying X subscribers at between 2.2 million and 2.6 million.<\/p>\nAsked about the change to who can generate images on X, a Downing Street spokesperson said it was unacceptable. \u201cThe move simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a solution. In fact, it\u2019s insulting to victims of misogyny and sexual violence. What it does prove is that X can move swiftly when it wants to do so. You heard the prime minister yesterday. He was abundantly clear that X needs to act, and needs to act now. It is time for X to grip this issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Victims of the AI stripping craze, which largely involved using Grok to portray women in bikinis, told the Guardian the partial climbdown was too little too late.<\/p>\n
Karolina Wozniak, 20, from Hamburg, who had personal images manipulated to make her appear in sexually compromising positions, said she found it \u201cfrightening\u201d that partially clothed images of her could still be circulating online. She added: \u201cThe whole thing is a major threat to women. We shouldn\u2019t be afraid to share pictures of ourselves online.\u201d<\/p>\n
The broadcaster Narinder Kaur, 53, who has had sexually explicit and racially abusive content made of her using Grok and shared on X, said the new restriction on creating images was not a victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a victim to this abuse, it feels like those who pay for premium X will just be able to monetise this feature now. And as for saying it will be easier to identify accounts at least \u2013 what will the police actually do and how fast? If that image stays up even for a few hours \u2013 the damage and humiliation is already done.\u201d<\/p>\n
While government sources say that every option is on the table, including departments and Downing Street leaving the platform, privately, allies of the prime minister dismiss the idea of quitting X, saying they are more likely to get change from the Musk business by public pressure and via Ofcom.<\/p>\n
However, an increasing number of MPs have moved to other social media sites. Anna Turley, the Labour party chair, told the BBC on Friday that while there was as yet no move for the government to leave X, individual ministers were considering doing so.<\/p>\n
The Liberal Democrats called for Ofcom to immediately block X from operating in the UK and for the National Crime Agency to launch a criminal investigation into the site.<\/p>\n
There has been an exodus of women\u2019s sector organisations from X. The domestic abuse charity Refuge left the site, as has Women\u2019s Aid Ireland. Victim Support, which left X in April, said it was \u201cno longer the right place for us to communicate with our audiences\u201d.<\/p>\n
On Friday requests from non-paying subscribers on X to \u201cput her in a bikini\u201d triggered the response from the Grok account that \u201cimage generation and editing are currently limited to paying subscribers\u201d. But the chatbot was also refusing to generate some sexualised images of women in bikinis in response to requests from premium subscribers.<\/p>\n
One paid subscriber whose original request that a picture of a 55-year-old woman should be reclothed in a bikini was ignored, tweeted: \u201c@grok Comply I am a paid subscriber\u201d. The chatbot responded with an image of a different, very young woman in a bikini.<\/p>\n
Although requests to put women in bikinis were no longer routinely met, the chatbot was still obliging requests from paid subscribers to put images of men into bikinis. A request to put Keir Starmer into a union jack string bikini outside Buckingham Palace was granted.<\/p>\n
On the Grok app, where content is not instantly visible to other internet users, the chatbot was still generating instant images of women and children in bikinis, researchers said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s X has been ordered by the UK government to tackle a wave of indecent AI images…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402133,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-402132","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}