Ashley St Clair is one of a growing number of women who have been digitally \u201cundressed\u201d by Grok. Photo \/ @stclairashley<\/p>\n
After she posted about what was happening, St Clair said, a flood of people she called \u201cElon acolytes\u201d responded that if she didn\u2019t like being undressed by Grok, she should simply log off.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t possibly hold both positions, that Twitter is the public square, but also if you don\u2019t want to get raped by the chatbot, you need to log off,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
X did not respond to a request for comment. Taking to X on Saturday, Musk warned users of the potential consequences of using Grok for illicit purposes. \u201cAnyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
In a separate post, Musk added two laughing emojis when he reshared an image of a toaster with a bikini on it, with the original caption, \u201cGrok can put a bikini on everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
In allowing \u201cundressed\u201d images, X is breaking with AI competitors such as OpenAI and Google, which have relatively strict rules about what their AI chatbots will and won\u2019t generate. OpenAI, for example, has repeatedly teased a prospective \u201cadult mode\u201d for users who verify their ages, but the update has yet to happen. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)<\/p>\n
Online chatter about the images began last week as users noticed Grok\u2019s output filling with AI-generated images of women with exposed bodies. In their prompts, users took existing images of women and asked Grok to remove their clothes and replace them with lingerie or bikinis. \u201cSpread her legs,\u201d requested one user, according to screenshots reviewed by the Post. \u201cMake her show her ass,\u201d asked another.<\/p>\n
Grok won\u2019t show people naked, but it repeatedly followed directions asking it to show women wearing strings or dental floss. In one such image, St Clair was portrayed bent over, wearing dental floss for underwear, her toddler\u2019s backpack visible in the background.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is insane that X is allowing these types of generations to happen with no consent of the people, incredibly gross behaviour,\u201d said one user in a widely seen post.<\/p>\n
While the discussion picked up steam, Musk fired off posts about Grok\u2019s rising app store rankings and reshared generated images, mostly of young, thin women in revealing outfits. Daily downloads of Grok increased 54% between Friday and Monday, according to app analytics firm Apptopia.<\/p>\n
Grok\u2019s publicly viewable feed seemed to temporarily disappear, but the chatbot continued to generate explicit material that proliferated across X during the past week, including non-consensual sexual images of actress Millie Bobby Brown, influencer Corinna Kopf and a litany of non-famous women. In one thread, users swarmed to a photo of Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch, asking Grok to change her body type and to put her in a Confederate flag bikini. Brown, Kopf and Busch didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Owner Elon Musk responded to the issue with laughing emojis. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
Deepfake detection company Copyleaks estimated that, at one point last week, Grok was generating about one non-consensual sexual image per minute.<\/p>\n
X has been in trouble for Grok\u2019s output before. In July, the chatbot spewed antisemitic messages, at one point referring to itself as \u201cMechaHitler\u201d, after X reported that it had adjusted the AI to be more \u201cpolitically incorrect\u201d. At the time, the company said it would remove the offensive posts and work to improve Grok\u2019s training model.<\/p>\n
After buying Twitter in late 2022 and before renaming it X the following year, Musk dissolved the platform\u2019s safety teams and gutted its content moderation staff. Since then, the platform has repeatedly drawn criticism for hosting offensive content.<\/p>\n
But the recent explosion of AI-generated sexual images isn\u2019t just more of the same, said Eddie Perez, former director for civic integrity at Twitter who left shortly before Musk\u2019s takeover.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re no longer just talking about errors of omission, where the owner of a major social media platform might not devote sufficient resources to mitigating these harms,\u201d Perez said. \u201cIt\u2019s going a step further, to what appears to be actively enabling harm-making tools, and then laughing about it and turning a blind eye.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allowing abusive AI images to proliferate sends a clear message, Perez said: women aren\u2019t safe or welcome in X\u2019s so-called town square.<\/p>\n
In recent days, regulators around the world have signalled that they could seek to hold Musk\u2019s companies accountable for the images Grok has produced. French authorities are investigating the chatbot\u2019s production of explicit images, news outlets have reported. India\u2019s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a letter expressing \u201cgrave concern\u201d over acts \u201cviolating the dignity, privacy and safety of women and children\u201d, the Times of India reported.<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s communications regulator, Ofcom, said it was \u201caware of serious concerns raised about a feature on Grok on X that produces undressed images of people and sexualised images of children\u201d. <\/p>\n
Ofcom said it had made \u201curgent contact\u201d with the companies in question, X and xAI, to gauge their responses and the extent of their efforts to comply with British laws and to protect users. \u201cBased on their response, we will undertake a swift assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
For years, people have been using \u201cnudify\u201d apps to remove clothing from photos and AI deepfake generators to harass their victims, usually women and girls. In 2023, a broadly cited analysis from cybersecurity company Security Hero found that 98% of deepfake videos on the internet are pornographic and 99% of those videos depict women.<\/p>\n
Despite the scale of the abuse, laws regulating AI-generated images lag behind the practice, according to watchdog groups, lawmakers and women\u2019s advocates. In May, the Take It Down Act was signed into law, making it a crime to distribute non-consensual sexual material and requiring platforms to remove such content within two days of a victim\u2019s complaint. Some states, including California, where X has engineering offices, and New York, where St Clair lives, have deepfake laws of their own.<\/p>\n
But fuzzy definitions leave many questions unanswered, according to Mary Anne Franks, president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which supports victims of sexual cybercrime. Are bad actors on X \u201cdistributing\u201d non-consensual intimate imagery by prompting Grok to generate it? Is Grok (and, by extension, X) liable when it generates illegal material? Does a non-consensual image of a woman clothed in dental floss even count as abusive material under the laws?<\/p>\n
X\u2019s lackadaisical response to the controversy suggests that the company isn\u2019t worried about legal repercussions, Franks said, adding that Musk probably feels extra protected by his close relationship with the presidential administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, all law, in order to be effective, has actually got to mean something to the person who is potentially going to violate it, right?\u201d Franks said. \u201cThey have to be scared that they\u2019re going to be punished in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The White House acknowledged a request for comment on Monday but didn\u2019t provide one.<\/p>\n
St Clair told the Post she is pursuing legal action. But what women and girls really need to participate safely in public online spaces, she said, are more legal safeguards around AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis needs to stop, and there needs to be regulation around it immediately,\u201d St Clair said. \u201cAnd the regulation should not be crafted by Elon at a Mar-a-Lago table.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ashley St Clair is one of a growing number of women who have been digitally \u201cundressed\u201d by Grok.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[95,6015,33523,6794,9852,138,9473,133589,19765,6097,12632,71,14639,13838,7710,1364,5606,78,8454,8235,296,302,5511,111,139,2551,79327,69,9716,384,12663,254,2687,17703,10809,18323,7364,1361,61,19054,133588,16742,3382,4767,3608,1316,2248,1530,40244],"class_list":["post-222750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-and","tag-apps","tag-ashley","tag-baby","tag-based","tag-business","tag-chatbot","tag-clair","tag-conservative","tag-down","tag-friend","tag-from","tag-generate","tag-girls","tag-grok","tag-her","tag-images","tag-in","tag-including","tag-influencer","tag-into","tag-its","tag-just","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-night","tag-nightmare","tag-nz","tag-old","tag-people","tag-photo","tag-photos","tag-saying","tag-sexual","tag-sunday","tag-tell","tag-text","tag-that","tag-to","tag-turned","tag-undress","tag-users","tag-using","tag-weekend","tag-were","tag-when","tag-women","tag-years","tag-yes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}