Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
