Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
