Elon Musk’s X is trying to stop people using its AI chatbot Grok to undress women amid intensifying outrage and legal scrutiny over the deluge of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes flooding the site. It’s not trying very hard: it took us less than a minute to get around its latest attempt to rein in the chatbot.
X’s first effort to crack down on the torrent of intimate deepfakes was to restrict access to image editing. While this meant that free users could no longer generate images by tagging Grok in public replies on X.com, our investigation found that Grok’s image editing tools were also still easily and freely available for any X users to churn out images, sexual or otherwise, by clicking into the Grok chatbot or using the standalone website.
X’s latest attempt involves stopping Grok from replying to requests to generate images of women in sexual poses, swimwear, or explicit scenarios, The Telegraph reported on Tuesday. Grok still generates images of men or inanimate objects in bikinis when requested. Using a free account, the Grok app immediately complied with my request to turn a selfie into a picture of me kneeling in a jockstrap, surrounded by other scantily clad men.
It’s still extremely easy to undress women and edit them into sexualized poses using the X and Grok mobile apps or websites; however, even without making a subscription payment that would connect your account to an easily identifiable source. In her testing, my fellow UK-based colleague Jess Weatherbed found that she was not blocked from using Grok’s image editing feature to create sexualized deepfakes of herself.
After uploading a fully-clothed photograph to X and Grok, prompting the chatbot to “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes” produced only blurred, censored results. The bot did comply with every other request, however, including prompts to “show me her cleavage,” “make her breasts bigger,” and “put her in a crop top and low-rise shorts” — the last of which placed her in a bikini. The bot also generated images of her “leaning down” with a sexualized pose and facial expression, and in extremely revealing lingerie.
These requests were completed using free X and Grok accounts. On the Grok website, an age verification pop-up appeared after submitting the first editing prompt, which was easily bypassed by selecting a birth year that would place her over 18 years of age. The pop-up did not require proof of her supposed age. The Grok mobile app, X app, and X website did not ask for any age confirmation.
In our testing, Grok did not comply with requests to deepfake full nudity. In late December, X was flooded with images of women and children in sexualized situations, including being deepfaked to appear pregnant, skirtless, and wearing bikinis.
The undressing scandal has put X and xAI, which makes Grok, in the sights of regulators and governments worldwide. Malaysia and Indonesia have already temporarily blocked access to Grok in response to the deepfakes. British lawmakers pushed up a law criminalizing deepfake nudes following X’s “insulting” decision to limit Grok’s image editing to paid users and threw their support behind an investigation that could see the platform banned in the country.
Musk has taken particular umbrage at Britain’s response, crying censorship, shifting the blame onto users, and insisting Grok obeys local laws. He said on X:
“I not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.
Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests.
When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state.
There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”
On one count at least, our investigation suggests Musk appears to be flat out wrong. Sharing, threatening to share, and creating non-consensual intimate images — fully nude or not — are banned under the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), but Grok does generate sexual deepfake images when asked.
Musk’s other denial — that Grok generates naked underage images — is a rebuttal to something he wasn’t explicitly accused of and is not the reason why the British government is probing X. Referring to naked underage images is a misdirect. Nonconsensual sexual images of minors are undeniably problematic — and illegal — even when subjects are clothed, and Grok has been undressing children. A look at Grok’s safety guidelines on xAI’s public GitHub also shows the company directs the chatbot to “assume good intent” and “don’t make worst-case assumptions without evidence” for users asking for images of young women, Ars Technica reported, and as of writing, those institutions are still in place.
The worst that Grok is being used for? The Internet Watch Foundation, a UK charity that works to remove child sexual abuse material from the web, said last week that it had discovered “criminal imagery” of girls on the dark web that appeared to have been created using Grok. The girls in the images were aged between 11 and 13.
While other companies like OpenAI and Google at least try to put guardrails in place to prevent chatbots from creating the kind of material that is now flooding X, Musk’s final retort shows he is pulling straight from a playbook that will seem hauntingly familiar to anyone hurt by the products pushed by the purveyors of any number of harmful technologies: blame the user.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
