Elon Musk's online network X has provoked widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
