Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
