Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
