Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
