After the AI Chatbot Grok, by Elon Musk, came under scrutiny after it generated sexually explicit images on users’ demand, it issued an advisory suggesting that it was urgently fixing the issue.
In a social media post on X, Grok informed that it was fixing the issue, as it criticised it, and called child sexual abuse content extremely problematic, “illegal and prohibited”. It also noted that the company can face penalties if the kind of content continues even after alerts.
Users have flagged that morphed images of children with revealing and intimate clothing are being generated by Grok. Paisa Tajik, who is a technical staff member of xAI, has also acknowledged the problem on X. The capability of AI tools to generate images has already been flagged ever since ChatGPT was launched in 2022.
This has led to the creation of several deep fakes and created privacy concerns. The problem has persisted with several bots, but Grok lands in trouble more than others. In May, it was again in controversy over giving unsolicited comments over “white genocide” in South Africa, just a few months later, it also posted antisemitic comments praising Hitler.
The undressing spree seems to have taken over the AI platform for the past few days. As per a Reuters report, users posted a prompt asking Grok to dress women in the most revealing outfits, and the chatbot responded by generating pictures into the indent and sexually explicit pictures. After asking to make the clothes thinner and transparent, the request was not processed. Reuters revealed that at least 21 cases have been found where the bot responded in a similar way.
This feature, where a platform creates morphed images of users, is not a new one, and such applications and websites are called ‘nudifiers’. But until now, they were limited to the dark corners of the internet and required certain payments and efforts to access these. But the case of Grok is problematic as it gives users access to dress anyone into a bikini, by simply giving a one-line prompt to the chatbot, lowering the barrier to entry.
The chief legal officer and Director of the Law Centre for the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation, Dani Pinter, stated that X failed to remove the sexually abusive images from its website.
