Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
