Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
