Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
