Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
