Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their garments.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
