Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
