Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
