Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
