Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of making graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
