Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of people in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
