Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
