Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
