Elon Musk's online network X has caused major outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to create images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes 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 "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
