Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI said late on Wednesday it imposed restrictions on all users of its Grok AI chatbot that limit image editing after the service produced sexualized images that sparked concerns among global regulators. “We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis. This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers,” the company said in an X post.
Hyper-realistic images of women manipulated to look like they were in microscopic bikinis, in degrading poses or covered in bruises began flooding social media platform X this month. In some cases, minors were digitally stripped down to swimwear, sparking broad criticism. Grok last week began allowing only paying subscribers to use its image generation and editing features. X last week curtailed Grok’s ability to generate or edit images publicly for many of its users, but the chatbot still privately produced sexually charged images on demand on Wednesday before xAI’s announcement, Reuters found. Billionaire Musk owns xAI, which in turn owns X, formerly known as Twitter. xAI added on Wednesday that it blocks users based on their location from generating images of people in skimpy attire in “jurisdictions where it’s illegal”. It did not name those jurisdictions.
