Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
