Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
