Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
