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'It Almost Felt Like a Digital Version of Sexual Assault'
In mid-December, Mollie posted a photo on X that showed her squatting in front of a Christmas tree in leggings and a long-sleeved shirt. “Are we getting into the Christmas spirit?” the 24-year-old captioned the post. A few weeks later, Mollie saw one of her followers reply underneath. “Put her in a micro bikini from this angle,” the user wrote, tagging the X AI chatbot Grok. Grok complied, showing an AI-generated image of Mollie squatting in the same position and wearing a thong bikini instead of workout gear.
As a fairly prominent adult creator — she has nearly 80,000 followers on X alone — Mollie is used to having random followers edit her content without her consent. Last year, she noticed some of her fans digitally altering images to make her bald, which she thought made her look somewhat like Matt Damon. But someone using AI to remove her clothes felt different. Her shock over how real the manipulated photo looked quickly gave way to mortification, then horror. “It was scary and it was uncomfortable to have that power asserted over you,” she says. “I’ve been sexually assaulted in the past, and it almost felt like a digital version of that.”
She told Grok to take the photo down. “I understand it violated your consent,” Grok responded. “I won’t create images like that going forward.” The photo, however, is still up on X, and Mollie continues to see women she follows on the platform complain about having their own images altered in a sexually suggestive way without their consent. “It is unfathomable to me that people are allowed to do this to women,” she says.
For the past week, X has been flooded by complaints from women begging Grok to stop digitally altering their photos to make them appear nude or put them in sexually compromising positions. The anti-Grok backlash started when X users pointed out that Grok had generated AI images of two scantily clad girls who appeared to be underage. On December 28, the Grok account issued a statement apologizing for the “incident,” referring to it as “a failure in safeguards” that “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM.” X’s Safety account also issued a statement, saying, “We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.”
https://www.thecut.com/article/elon-musk-grok-sexual-images-ashley-st-clair.html
As a fairly prominent adult creator — she has nearly 80,000 followers on X alone — Mollie is used to having random followers edit her content without her consent. Last year, she noticed some of her fans digitally altering images to make her bald, which she thought made her look somewhat like Matt Damon. But someone using AI to remove her clothes felt different. Her shock over how real the manipulated photo looked quickly gave way to mortification, then horror. “It was scary and it was uncomfortable to have that power asserted over you,” she says. “I’ve been sexually assaulted in the past, and it almost felt like a digital version of that.”
She told Grok to take the photo down. “I understand it violated your consent,” Grok responded. “I won’t create images like that going forward.” The photo, however, is still up on X, and Mollie continues to see women she follows on the platform complain about having their own images altered in a sexually suggestive way without their consent. “It is unfathomable to me that people are allowed to do this to women,” she says.
For the past week, X has been flooded by complaints from women begging Grok to stop digitally altering their photos to make them appear nude or put them in sexually compromising positions. The anti-Grok backlash started when X users pointed out that Grok had generated AI images of two scantily clad girls who appeared to be underage. On December 28, the Grok account issued a statement apologizing for the “incident,” referring to it as “a failure in safeguards” that “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM.” X’s Safety account also issued a statement, saying, “We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.”
https://www.thecut.com/article/elon-musk-grok-sexual-images-ashley-st-clair.html
20 replies
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Interacting in unacceptable ways.
