A woman has told the BBC she felt “dehumanised and reduced into a sexual stereotype” after Elon Musk’s AI Grok was used to digitally remove her clothing.<\/p>\n
The BBC has seen several examples on the social media platform X of people asking the chatbot to undress women to make them appear in bikinis without their consent, as well as putting them in sexual situations.<\/p>\n
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to a request for comment, other than with an automatically-generated reply stating “legacy media lies”.<\/p>\n
Samantha Smith shared a post on X about her image being altered, which was met with comments from those who had experienced the same – before others asked Grok to generate more of her.<\/p>\n
“Women are not consenting to this,” she said. <\/p>\n
“While it wasn’t me that was in states of undress, it looked like me and it felt like me and it felt as violating as if someone had actually posted a nude or a bikini picture of me.”<\/p>\n
A Home Office spokesperson said it was legislating to ban nudification tools, and under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tech would “face a prison sentence and substantial fines”.<\/p>\n
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must “assess the risk” of people in the UK viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI images.<\/p>\n
Grok is a free AI assistant – with some paid for premium features – which responds to X users’ prompts when they tag it in a post.<\/p>\n
It is often used to give reaction or more context to other posters’ remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.<\/p>\n