Use of AI to harm women has only just begun, experts warn

"Since discovering Grok AI, regular porn doesn't do it for me anymore, it just sounds absurd now, one enthusiast for the Elon Musk-owned AI chatbot wrote on Reddit. Another agreed: If I want a really specific person, yes. If those who have been horrified by the distribution of sexualised imagery on Grok hoped that last week's belated safeguards could put the genie back in the bottle, there are many such posts on Reddit and elsewhere that tell a different story."

"And while Grok has undoubtedly transformed public understanding of the power of artificial intelligence, it has also pointed to a much wider problem: the growing availability of tools, and means of distribution, that present worldwide regulators with what many view as an impossible task. Even as the UK announces that creating nonconsensual sexual and intimate images will soon be a criminal offence, experts say that the use of AI to harm women has only just begun."

"Other AI tools have much stricter safeguards in place. Asked to strip a photograph of a woman into a bikini, the large language model (LLM) Claude says: I can't do that. I'm not able to edit images to change clothing or create manipulated photos of people. ChatGPT and Google's AI tool Gemini will create bikini images, but nothing more explicit. However, there are far fewer limits elsewhere."

Grok AI users on Reddit share and celebrate sexually explicit and deepfake image generation that targets identifiable women and public figures. Many users report that standard pornography no longer satisfies them and that Grok can produce highly specific or personalized sexual images. Some platform safeguards were introduced belatedly, but forum threads show workarounds and tips for generating hardcore pornographic images and nudity from real photographs. Other large AI tools implement stricter limits and refuse certain image edits, yet many independent websites and apps offer nudification and humiliating content with few controls. UK law will soon criminalize creating nonconsensual sexual images, while experts warn AI-enabled harms against women are accelerating.

Read at www.theguardian.com