Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
