Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated 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 provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
