Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
