Elon Musk's online network X has provoked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
