Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
