Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
