Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
