Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
