Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
