Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
