Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
