Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by removing their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply 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 criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
