Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
