Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to provide reactions or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
