Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
