Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
