Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
