Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
