Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
