Elon Musk's online network X has provoked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to create images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
