Elon Musk's online network X has caused significant outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
