Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
