Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
