Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
