Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
