Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to create images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
