Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their attire.
Numerous instances have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.