Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their clothing.
Several cases have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
