Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
