Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
