Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
