Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
