Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
