Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
