Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
