Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests 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 can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
