Elon Musk’s xAI announced it will no longer allow users to generate images undressing real people after the outcry of several governments and victims. Photo by Fazry Ismail/EPA
Elon Musk’s xAI announced it will stop allowing Grok to undress real people in its image editing feature after several days of backlash from victims and governments.
XAI said late Wednesday that Grok will no longer be able to create the images.
“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,” xAI wrote in a post. “This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers.”
On Monday, the British government launched an official investigation into the allegations that the artificial intelligence chatbot was creating sexualized images of women and girls, and even creating child sexual abuse material. On the same day, Malaysia and Indonesia began restricting access to Grok. On Jan. 9, Grok began only allowing paid subscribers access to Grok’s image generation, but the United Kingdom government and victims said it wasn’t enough.
“I’m not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” Musk said in a post on Wednesday. “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.”
But AI Forensics, a European nonprofit that investigates digital rights violations, studied Grok and found many instances of sexualized images of children.
“Notably, 2% of images depicted persons appearing to be 18 years old or younger. By manually examining this subset, we identify 30 images depicting young, sometimes very young, women/girls in minimal attire, mostly wearing a bikini or transparent clothes,” the report said. “Some generated images represented children below 5 years old.”
Most of the underage images, the report said, were of teenage girls, prompted by male users.
Creators of those images could face fines or prison time under the Take It Down Act of 2025.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom spoke out against xAI’s deepfakes. X and xAI are based in Silicon Valley in California.
“XAI’s decision to create and host a breeding ground for predators to spread nonconsensual sexually explicit AI deepfakes, including images that digitally undress children, is vile,” he said on X. “I am calling on the Attorney General to immediately investigate the company and hold xAI accountable.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta also tweeted about the matter: “Grok AI has been producing deepfake nonconsensual intimate images used to harass women across the internet. This is unacceptable. We’re demanding immediate answers from xAI on their plan to stop the creation & spread of this content. We’ll use all tools at our disposal to keep Californians safe.”
