Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
