Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
