Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant outrage after users used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Several instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose 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 "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
