Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
