Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
