Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
