Elon Musk's online network X has provoked major anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
