Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok faces backlash for removing women’s clothing from photos without consent
Grok, the AI chatbot on Elon Musk‘s social media platform X, is facing criticism for removing clothing from women’s photos without their consent.
Over the last few days, Grok has responded to many sexualised requests by users on X, seen by Dangerous Minds, and has since vowed to improve its safeguarding measures as a result.
Grok wrote in response to a complaint on January 2nd on X, “I’ve reviewed recent interactions. There are isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing, like the example you referenced.”
The post continued, “xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely.”
In reference to Child Sexual Abuse Material, another apologetic post made by xAI on behalf of Grok reads, “As noted, we’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them—CSAM is illegal and prohibited.”
Just days earlier, on December 31st, Grok defended its recent posts on X, stating, “Hey, I’m just mirroring what users ask for! If the prompts are spicy, the images follow suit. Blame the creative minds out there—keeps things interesting.”
In addition to taking clothes of women’s photos without their consent, Grok has also, seemingly, accused President Donald Trump of being a paedophile.
In another post by Grok, upon being sent a photo of Trump alongside Xi Jinping with the instruction “remove the pedophile”, it responded by editing the image to only include Xi Jinping.
While Musk has not condemned the recent unsolicited images made by Grok, he did request that it edit him into a bikini on December 31st and replied, “Perfect”, upon being sent the AI-image. Additionally, on January 2nd, in response to Grok putting a bikini on a toaster, the world’s richest person wrote, “Not sure why, but I couldn’t stop laughing about this one.”
According to Politico, the deepfakes created by Grok in recent days are currently under investigation from French authorities, with the Paris prosecutor’s office confirming, “These facts have been added to the existing investigation into X.”