LONDON

Experts warned Wednesday that AI-related harms to women are likely to worsen as concerns about artificial intelligence being used to harm them have intensified, following issues with Grok’s image-generation tool.

Nations across the world accelerated scrutiny of xAI’s Grok, an artificial intelligence chatbot, amid concerns that the tool can be used to generate non-consensual, sexually explicit and manipulated images.

Recently, the chatbot was shown to respond to prompts that digitally remove clothing from images of people or otherwise alter their appearance into sexualized content, often without the consent of those depicted.

Grok, meanwhile, has introduced safeguards to prevent sexualized AI imagery, but it did not prevent concerns from experts who feared things would only get worse.

Anne Craanen, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), told The Guardian that there are far fewer limits on many websites, forums and apps devoted to nudification and the humiliation of women as users of the Grok forum on Reddit have been sharing tips on how to generate pornographic images, possibly using pictures of real women.

She said the route for misogynistic content to reach the wider internet has grown broader.

"There is a very fruitful ground there for misogyny to thrive," Craanen was quoted by the British newspaper.

An ISD research from last summer revealed that there were dozens of nudification apps and websites, which collectively received nearly 21 million visitors in May.

"There are hundreds of apps hosted on mainstream app stores like Apple and Google that make this possible," said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who is a co-founder of American Sunlight Project.

Clare McGlynn, a law professor from Durham University, said she feared things would only get worse.

"OpenAI announced last November that it was going to allow ‘erotica’ in ChatGPT. What has happened on X shows that any new technology is used to abuse and harass women and girls," she noted.