Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
