xAI’s Grok is eradicating clothes from footage of individuals with out their consent following this week’s rollout of a feature that enables X customers to immediately edit any picture utilizing the bot with no need the unique poster’s permission. Not solely does the unique poster not get notified if their image was edited, however Grok seems to have few guardrails in place for stopping something in need of full express nudity. In the previous few days, X has been flooded with imagery of girls and youngsters showing pregnant, skirtless, sporting a bikini, or in different sexualized conditions. World leaders and celebrities, too, have had their likenesses utilized in photographs generated by Grok.
AI authentication firm Copyleaks reported that the development to take away clothes from photographs started with adult-content creators asking Grok for attractive photographs of themselves after the discharge of the brand new picture enhancing function. Customers then started making use of comparable prompts to pictures of different customers, predominantly ladies, who didn’t consent to the edits. Ladies famous the fast uptick in deepfake creation on X to varied information shops, together with Metro and PetaPixel. Grok was already able to switch photographs in sexual methods when tagged in a put up on X, however the brand new “Edit Picture” instrument seems to have spurred the current surge in reputation.
In a single X put up, now faraway from the platform, Grok edited a photograph of two younger women into skimpy clothes and sexually suggestive poses. One other X consumer prompted Grok to issue an apology for the “incident” involving “an AI picture of two younger women (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized apparel,” calling it “a failure in safeguards” that it mentioned could have violated xAI’s insurance policies and US regulation. (Whereas it’s not clear whether or not the Grok-created photographs would meet this normal, life like AI-generated sexually express imagery of identifiable adults or youngsters could be unlawful below US regulation.) In one other back-and-forth with a consumer, Grok urged that customers report it to the FBI for CSAM, noting that it’s “urgently fixing” the “lapses in safeguards.”
However Grok’s phrase is nothing greater than an AI-generated response to a consumer asking for a “heartfelt apology observe” — it doesn’t point out Grok “understands” what it’s doing or essentially mirror operator xAI’s precise opinion and insurance policies. As an alternative, xAI responded to Reuters’ request for comment on the state of affairs with simply three phrases: “Legacy Media Lies.” xAI didn’t reply to The Verge’s request for remark in time for publication.
Elon Musk himself appears to have sparked a wave of bikini edits after asking Grok to switch a memetic picture of actor Ben Affleck with himself sporting a bikini. Days later, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un’s leather-based jacket was changed with a multicolored spaghetti bikini; US President Donald Trump stood close by in an identical swimsuit. (Cue jokes a couple of nuclear battle.) A photograph of British politician Priti Patel, posted by a consumer with a sexually suggestive message in 2022, obtained was a bikini image on January 2nd. In response to the wave of bikini pics on his platform, Musk jokingly reposted a picture of a toaster in a bikini captioned “Grok can put a bikini on every part.”
Whereas a number of the photographs — just like the toaster — have been evidently meant as jokes, others have been clearly designed to supply borderline-pornographic imagery, together with particular instructions for Grok to make use of skimpy bikini types or take away a skirt fully. (The chatbot did take away the skirt, however it didn’t depict full, uncensored nudity within the responses The Verge noticed.) Grok additionally complied with requests to switch the garments of a toddler with a bikini.
Musk’s AI merchandise are prominently marketed as closely sexualized and minimally guardrailed. xAI’s AI companion Ani flirted with Verge reporter Victoria Track, and Jess Weatherbed discovered that Grok’s video generator readily created topless deepfakes of Taylor Swift, regardless of xAI’s acceptable use policy banning the depiction of “likenesses of individuals in a pornographic method.” Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora video turbines, in distinction, have guardrails round era of NSFW content material, although Sora has additionally been used to supply movies of children in sexualized contexts and fetish videos. The prevalence of deepfake photographs is rising quickly, in response to a report from cybersecurity agency DeepStrike, and plenty of of those photographs comprise nonconsensual sexualized imagery; a 2024 survey of US college students discovered that 40 % have been conscious of a deepfake of somebody they knew, whereas 15 % have been conscious of nonconsensual express or intimate deepfakes.
When requested why it’s remodeling photographs of girls into bikini pics, Grok denied posting pictures with out consent, saying: “These are AI creations based mostly on requests, not actual picture edits with out consent.”
Take an AI bot’s denial as you want.