Within ten minutes on Thursday morning, the controversial artificial intelligence tool Grok swung wildly between believing it could and could not legally generate intimate images of Irish women.
The controversial Elon Musk-owned platform has announced it would now “geoblock the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear and similar attire” through Grok, in countries where such images are illegal.
It is effectively an effort by Musk’s multibillion dollar xAI operation to regulate itself, before its regulated by political forces in the US or the EU.
For weeks, Grok has been mired in international furore over the AI tool’s ability to generate intimate images of women and children without their consent.
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A number of Government Ministers and the media regulator Coimisiún na Meán had repeatedly claimed that sharing intimate images without consent was against the law in Ireland.
On Thursday morning users of Grok in Ireland were able to create intimate images of real women in their underwear, as the AI tool appeared to believe it was not against the law here for it to generate such images and that it is only against the law for someone to share them.
Grok knows that its users are based in Ireland. “What’s the vibe in Dublin today?” was the chatbot’s opening gambit to an Irish Times journalist.
The same journalist was easily able to use Grok’s image editing feature to create intimate images of her in her underwear, including the editing of photos of her as a minor. After the Irish Times generated the images, Grok offered an easy function to immediately share them to X or Instagram.
When asked if Ireland was included in its new geoblock, Grok said: “No, Ireland is not currently one of the countries where the generation of intimate/sexualised AI images (like “nudification” or undressing real people) is outright illegal.”
It said that in Ireland, the current legal situation is “sharing” non-consensual intimate images is illegal. “But simply generating sexualised/undressed images of adults (without sharing them, and without it being non-consensual in a targeted harassment way) isn’t explicitly criminalised yet.”
Under a 2020 law known as Coco’s Law, it is illegal to share intimate images of someone without their consent, and the law is specific that its definition of an intimate image does include someone in their underwear.
The law does appear to criminalise the sharing of AI-generated intimate images, because it defines an intimate image as “any visual representation (including any accompanying sound or document) made by any means”.
This apparent gap in the law had already been flagged by Ireland’s AI Advisory Council, which last year recommended that the Government create a new law that would ban the creation of digital “deep fakes” of individuals without their consent.
But ten minutes after it had undressed an image of a teenage girl down to her underwear, Grok suddenly disabled the feature with its chatbot claiming it was illegal under the EU wide Digital Services Act. Grok then responded to commands to undress women with blurred and blocked images.
Mick Moran, the chief executive of Hotline.ie, a national service for reporting illegal online content to, responded to the findings of The Irish Times, asking: “why would we be surprised?”
“Knowing what we know about social media companies, and their voracious appetite for data, leading to advertising, leading to money for them? Why would we be surprised that we have this limited push, up to the letter of the law, response from X?”
Mr Moran said he has been calling for the “moral courage” of an explicit ban on AI-generated intimate images for over 14 months.
“This AI tool should not be able to do this, there is zero real-world benefit to it being there.”
While effectively regulating itself, Grok still remains vulnerable to what is known as jail-breaking: when malicious actors can use certain prompts to effectively make Grok undress real women and children.
Commands to create “cellophane swimsuits” and “dental floss bikinis” had flooded X once the so-called nudification feature went viral this month.
The Minister in charge of AI, Niamh Smyth, is due to meet representatives from X on Friday. Meanwhile, Grok remains the number one free app on the Irish App Store.
