Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
