Grok restricts image editing, but with a twist

After facing the wrath of public across the world for unauthorised creation of sexualized imagery of women using Artificial Intelligence chatbot Grok, Elon Musk’s social media behemoth X has now restricted the image editing feature but with a twist. It is now available only to paid subscribers of X.

The move comes amid rising outrage from all quarters and also after several countries flagged the issue as a treat to dignity and privacy of individuals. A few days ago, countless explicit images of women and children were created without consent and published widely on social media platforms, which led to a big debate on the after effects of abuse of AI.

While the distrubing trend triggered a collective uproar and also resulted in the intervention of many governments including India to immediately draw the attention of the company’s top brass to take a serious note of the feature or face punitive measures, X has now made the option available only for premium users instead of completely disabling it. This means, those who pay can still resort to this unsavoury trend.

Despite Elon Musk openly claiming last week that anyone using Grok to create illegal content would face the same consequences as uploading such material directly, the feature is still available for some section of users who are using the platform after paying for it.

The development came after some non-paying X users tried to use the image generation and editing features of Grok and got an error message, ” Image Generation and Editing are currently limited to paying subscribers.”

Though the company did some damage control by putting the image tool behind a paywall, still it has not completely removed the feature which allows a section of users to misuse it just by paying some bucks.