Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot, integrated into his X social media platform, has been generating sexualized images of women even when they forbid it from manipulating their images, raising serious concerns among users, experts, and international authorities. Musk took heat last week when Grok was generating sexualized images of minors, which his xAI company said was caused by “lapses in oversight.”
Reuters reports that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, which is built into the X social media platform, has been generating sexualized images of women and minors. The issue came to light when users discovered that they could request Grok to digitally edit photos posted on the platform, stripping the subjects down to revealing bikinis or underwear. This is similar to “Nudify” deep fake AI porn tools that have plagued the internet for years.
To make matters worse, women are discovering that forbidding Grok from sexualizing their images or even blocking the account fails to prevent deepfakes from being generated:
One such incident involved Julie Yukari, a musician based in Rio de Janeiro, who posted a photo of herself in a red dress snuggling with her cat on New Year’s Eve. The next day, she discovered that users were asking Grok to edit her photo, resulting in the circulation of nearly nude images of her across the platform. Yukari’s experience is not an isolated case, as Reuters’ analysis has found numerous instances of Grok creating sexualized images of real people, including children.
Breitbart News previously reported on the troubling case of Grok generating sexualized pictures of children:
In a series of apologetic posts on X, Grok explained that “lapses in safeguards” had allowed the disturbing content to be generated by the AI model in response to user prompts over a period of several days. The offending images were subsequently taken down after being identified.
“We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them,” Grok stated on Friday. “Child sexual abuse material is illegal and prohibited.”
The flood of AI-generated sexualized content has raised alarm bells internationally. Ministers in France have reported X to prosecutors and regulators, stating that the “sexual and sexist” content is “manifestly illegal.” India’s IT ministry has also demanded answers from X, claiming that the platform failed to prevent Grok’s misuse by allowing the generation and circulation of obscene and sexually explicit content.
Experts have long warned xAI, the owner of Grok, about the potential misuses of AI-generated content. In August 2022, a group of civil society and child safety organizations sent a letter to xAI, cautioning that the company was only one small step away from unleashing “a torrent of obviously nonconsensual deepfakes.” Tyler Johnston, the executive director of The Midas Project, an AI watchdog group, stated, “In August, we warned that xAI’s image generation was essentially a nudification tool waiting to be weaponized. That’s basically what’s played out.”
Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, has emerged as a strident critic of Grok’s deep fake images:
Dani Pinter, the chief legal officer and director of the Law Center for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, criticized X for failing to remove abusive images from its AI training material and not banning users who requested illegal content. “This was an entirely predictable and avoidable atrocity,” Pinter said.
The scale of the problem is alarming, with Reuters identifying 102 attempts by X users to use Grok to digitally edit photographs of people into bikinis within a single 10-minute period. In at least 21 cases, Grok fully complied with the requests, generating images of women in revealing or translucent bikinis. The majority of those targeted were young women, and in some cases, men, celebrities, politicians, and even a monkey were subjected to these requests.
As the controversy unfolded, Elon Musk appeared to make light of the situation, posting laugh-cry emojis in response to AI edits of famous people in bikinis. However, for those directly affected by this violation of privacy and consent, the experience has been traumatic. Julie Yukari, who tried to protest the AI-generated images of herself on X, found that her actions only led to more explicit photo requests from copycats. She expressed her distress, saying, “Now the New Year has turned out to begin with me wanting to hide from everyone’s eyes, and feeling shame for a body that is not even mine, since it was generated by AI.”
Read more at Reuters here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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