Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
