Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of women by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
