Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, has caused global outrage after it made it really easy to virtually undress people via AI image editing. Musk’s competitor to ChatGPT is integrated into the social media platform X and earlier this month users started asking it to do some pretty gross things. X was flooded with images of semi-naked women, with users able to reply to anyone’s perfectly innocent picture and ask it to put them in a bikini, for example. While Musk initially downplayed the scandal and was slow to act, he’s now put limits on the tool. But is that the end of the story and should X be banned?Today, Sam Cole, a tech journalist and co-founder of 404 Media on the Grok scandal and how it enabled the exploitation and abuse of women. Featured: Sam Cole, co-founder of 404 MediaSubscribe to ABC News Daily on the ABC listen app.Program:More from ABC News DailyAustralia, Online Abuse, AI, Social Media, Internet Culture, Internet, Sexual Misconduct, WomenTranscriptSam Hawley: Elon Musk loved it. His AI tool, Grok, which enabled users to edit images of real people and put them online for all to see. And even when his X platform was flooded with images of semi-naked women, he was slow to act. Well, now he's put limits on the tool. But is that the end of the story? Today, Sam Cole, a tech journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, on the Grok scandal. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.Sam Hawley: Sam, we'd better start by explaining what Grok is before delving into the controversy over how it's been editing images. This is a tool linked to Elon Musk's X platform, which used to be, of course, Twitter. So just tell me about it. How is it meant to work?Sam Cole: So Grok is a generative AI chatbot. It was developed by XAI, which is Elon Musk's company. It's a standalone app, but it's also something that you can tag on X in the feed like you're talking to another user. So you can have conversations with it. You can ask it things. You can obviously generate images with it. He made it as this like non-woke quote unquote response to OpenAI's chatbots, to ChatGPT. He has said that he thinks that those other chatbots are too politically correct. Again, that's another quote from him. So it's meant to be this like uncensored version of these other popular chatbots.Sam Hawley: Yeah. Okay. And since 2023, he has made a number of changes. And one of those, of course, is this function to actually edit images. And that's, of course, where all this controversy comes in because users could reply to any image, you know, of anything really, for example, a woman or a girl, and ask Grok to change her appearance. To actually make her semi-nude. Just explain that.Sam Cole: Yeah. So this has been something that's been going on for a while and just in the last couple weeks has really exploded in popularity with users. And it also seems like the guardrails are just all over the place lately. People were asking it to put a clear tape string bikini on her, like under an image of a woman who is fully clothed, take her clothes off. Also things like turn around and bend over. I won't get too explicit. But people would reply under those images and say, hey, Grok, can you make her fill in the blank? Use your imagination.Sam Hawley: Oh my gosh. Yeah. And it was just being flooded with these images, wasn't it? Unfortunately, I think you had to trawl through them. And as you say, some of them are so explicit you wouldn't even want to describe them.Sam Cole: Yeah, for sure. And it was every couple of seconds people were making dozens of these images. During the peak of this activity, you could just see every few seconds people were asking it to make her blank, put her in blank, make her do this and that. So, yeah, it was pretty depressing to watch that happen in real time.Sam Hawley: And everyone could see these images, could they? Not just the creators.Sam Cole: Exactly. Yeah, that's a big part of the abusiveness of this activity is it's all right there in the feed. And then you see images of women who did not ask to be put in these situations, these scenarios being depicted by men who are, I assume, men, prompting Grok to do all of these non-consensual things right there with everybody else.Sam Hawley: Yeah, so these women have just put innocent photos up of themselves doing typical things, I presume, and they've become victims of this.Sam Cole: Yeah, just like posing on vacation or mirror selfies or things that you do online just as a normal person.Sam Hawley: And, Sam, the really, I guess, concerning thing, although it's all horrifying, is that in some cases it does involve underage girls. It's terrible.Sam Cole: Yeah, for sure. I mean, there were reports of people making images of very young-looking girls in these sexual scenarios, sexualised images of young women and girls. It crosses a whole new line into not only just highly illegal content, but just ethically and morally abhorrent content.Sam Hawley: Well, of course, the more this went on and the more of these images that flooded onto Grok, you know, people became really very concerned. The scandal was growing. The EU spokesman, Thomas Regnier, he was absolutely scathing, and he did say that what Grok was doing was illegal.Thomas Regnier, EU digital affairs spokesperson: So we are very well aware of the fact that X or Grok or X for Grok is now offering a spicy mode, showing explicit sexual content with some outputs generated with childlike images. This is not spicy. This is illegal. This is appalling. This is disgusting. This is how we see it. And this has no place in Europe.Sam Hawley: He wasn't the only one, of course, across the world. You know, people were just outraged by this, weren't they?Sam Cole: Yeah, there were leaders in the UK that were calling for Grok to be banned in the UK if it didn't clean up its act.Keir Starmer, UK Prime Minister: They must act. We will take the necessary measures. We will strengthen existing laws and prepare for legislation if it needs to go further. And Ofcom will continue its independent investigation.Sam Cole: Obviously, deepfake content and non-consensual intimate imagery is illegal in lots of places in the US. It's also against the App Store rules for Apple and Google. It's very much against their terms of use to have these apps that create non-consensual imagery. And it's really confusing to me why Grok is even still available on the App Store, why they tolerate Grok and not a lot of other content, as they rightly shouldn't.Sam Hawley: Well, let's now turn, Sam, to Elon Musk's reaction to all of this, because his initial response was really lacklustre, wasn't it? He didn't seem to really care.Sam Cole: He said that he hadn't seen it. He seems to be on there a lot, so I would think he's seen it. But that was what he said. He said, you know, he hasn't seen it. And then X, the platform, obviously, there's an adult present in that company somewhere, because they said that anyone using Grok to make this content will have the same consequences as if they uploaded illegal content, which is an interesting statement because it is illegal content in a lot of places. So at least they said something, I guess. And then after the UK said, we're going to ban X if you don't fix this, Elon said that they just want to suppress free speech, which is usually his line.Sam Hawley: And one of his ideas to sort of fix this problem, if you like, was to actually put this AI image editing tool behind a paywall. So you just had to subscribe to be able to access it, like that would actually fix the problem. It didn't actually remove any of the horrific things that were being posted.Sam Cole: Yeah, exactly. It's such an interesting play, I guess, by X in response to everyone saying this is content that we don't want to see, that people who want a healthy social media platform don't want as part of their daily experience on the platform. The response to their users saying that was, oh, well, now you have to pay to generate it. And if you're a paying subscriber, then you can unlock these features, which is only making X more money. They've tweaked it and they've changed it a bit since then. But yeah, that was the immediate response.Sam Hawley: And as you say, even when people like the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, were saying that they had to take action, it could be banned, Elon Musk, he was still saying that he wasn't aware of naked underage images on the platform, that he'd literally seen zero of those images. So eventually, though, of course, Musk did have to act. All users were blocked from making explicit images of real people. But is that really the end of it, Sam? Can we say it's problem solved? I suggest not.Sam Cole: I doubt it. I mean, it's that's a really difficult thing about any of these image generators and chatbots is people will find a way around whatever guardrails are put in place, whatever restrictions are put in place, people will find a new creative way to get around them. So I don't think it's safe to say that X or Grok is now safe and problem solved because this isn't the first incident. It won't be the last because of the way that it was built and because of the response that the person who made it, which would be Elon Musk, has had so far is to just kind of say he's not responsible, he's not accountable.Sam Hawley: All right, well, Sam, let's look then at what else then needs to be done, because if you're a little tech savvy, you know, as you say, there's ways around this. Here in Australia, we have an e-safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who annoys the Americans a lot, just on a side. She launched an investigation into X and whether child abuse material was generated by Grok.Julie Inman Grant, eSafety Commissioner: We've just announced a second investigation into XAI, but we're also going to be implementing world leading AI companion and chatbot restrictions in March of this year. So while we're talking about social media today, we're thinking about how we protect young people from an even more potential catastrophic harms from AI.Sam Hawley: What do you make of action like that? And how do you think Elon Musk feels about it?Sam Cole: This is very much from the start been something that's been on the radar of leadership in Australia. So I think it makes sense that they would react in this way and say, you know, we need to investigate this just like the UK and the EU. And Musk should be concerned, considering the whole world has said that this is unacceptable. I don't think that he's above the law in all these places, certainly. So I think it'll be really interesting to see what happens to Grok, if it's even worth the risk to his company at this point to keep it running. I assume because this is kind of his like chatbot baby that it will survive no matter what. But we'll see in what capacity that looks like.Sam Hawley: And what about the victims involved, the people that have had their images doctored online? It must be incredibly damaging and long lasting for those people. It's awful.Sam Cole: And especially when it's on a platform like X, which is huge and very mainstream and used to be Twitter as we knew it to be, you know, the place where everyone was. It was the social media app that everyone was using. For it to happen on a really mainstream platform like this is very serious. This sexual abuse imagery and non-essential abusive imagery has been a problem on X and Twitter for a very long time. So I think what we're seeing now is the people who are targeted by it say that it it messes with their lives. Like it makes it harder to get a job because if you're Googling your name, what comes up is social media posts that look like you were posing nude. It's something that maybe an employer doesn't want to see or a landlord or a judge giving you custody of your kids. It's something that definitely affects people's lives in a very serious way. And I think most people who are targeted by it really just want it to stop. Like they don't want to see it spread anymore. I think they're less concerned about whether or not Elon Musk pays for his actions and more just like please end the harassment that's been going on for so long.Sam Hawley: So in your view, then, what's the solution here? Because people do enjoy the benefits that come with AI features on apps like this. But what can they do then to mitigate the risks?Sam Cole: It would be tempting to hear this problem explained and to think, oh, well, women shouldn't post their bodies online. They shouldn't be posting selfies if they don't want someone to do weird stuff to them, things like that. But our lives are happening online. So much of experiencing social life now is social media. So that's not getting to the root of the problem. That's also not a good solution. I'm not even sure if banning X in specific countries is a good solution because people just find new places to do this stuff. I think just having conversations like these about why it's not OK, explaining the impacts that it has on people who are targeted. I think having these really open conversations about why it's not OK, why it's not cool to do. This is something that is happening in middle schools and young kids, grade school kids are being targeted by their peers in class with nudify apps and with these undress apps. And now with Grok. So I think just talking to young people, especially, especially young men, honestly, about things like consent and healthy boundaries and why it's not OK to share these images to make them, to post them, things like that. This is a conversation that is so overdue. I think would go a lot further than guard railing against phrases like bikini on Grok.Sam Hawley: Sam Cole is tech journalist and co-founder of 404 Media, a tech news website. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Cinnamon Nippard. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. To get in touch with the team, please email us on ABCNewsDaily@abc.net.au. Thanks for listening.