Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their clothing.
Several instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
